A looney bin in Las Vegas.” The lexeme psychiatryk ‘mental hospital’ as used across the Internet

Abstract

Recently, the issue of language in psychiatry has been raised more frequently. The concern for choosing the appropriate words has resulted in developing language recommendations regarding the way we should speak about treating mental health disorders. The lexeme psychiatryk‘mental hospital’ has been mentioned among words that contribute to preserving the negative stereotypes of psychiatric care. Thus, the paper focuses on the ways in which this word is evaluated across the Internet. Since the author analyses specific utterances – the ways language is used, she employs the framework of linguistic pragmatics to account for the broad context of each utterance (the speaker’s intentions, utterance type, the assumed hearer, etc.). In the majority of the analysed cases, we can observe such uses of the words that uphold the negative stereotype of institutionalized psychiatric care, and the hospitals themselves (inexamples that exhibit playfulness, bordering on colloquialism and derision) are represented as appalling, pathological or funny and incomprehensible.