Health Communication and Psychological Distress: Exploring the Language of Self-harm

Harvey, Kevin; Brown, Brian J.

doi:10.3138/cmlr.1103

Cited by 11 publications

(7 citation statements)

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“…In recent a corpus-assisted research study, Harvey and Brown (2012) reported on an examination of adolescents' linguistic formulations of self-harm concerns in the AHEC. As the list of mental-health-related keywords derived from this corpus (appearing in Table 9.1 in the previous section) attests, a number of the most salient keywords in the corpus relate to the topic of self-harm.…”

Section: Study 2: Expressing Concerns About Self-harm Onlinementioning

confidence: 99%

Examining the Discourse of Mental Illness in a Corpus of Online Advice-Seeking Messages

Brookes

Harvey

2016

Talking at Work

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Section: Study 2: Expressing Concerns About Self-harm Onlinementioning

confidence: 99%

Examining the Discourse of Mental Illness in a Corpus of Online Advice-Seeking Messages

Brookes

Harvey

2016

Talking at Work

Self Cite

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“…indeed emerge from this type of research. Addiction themes have been observed in 3.4–41.7% of posts to NSSI message boards, ( Whitlock et al, 2006 ), 10.8% of posts to NSSI groups on Facebook ( Niwa & Mandrusiak, 2012 ), and many NSSI-related messages sent from teens to health professionals ( Harvey & Brown, 2012 ). Posters would frequently solicit help for their “addiction” to NSSI or celebrate anniversaries or lengths of time free from NSSI, much like individuals in recovery from SUD.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Getting “clean” from nonsuicidal self-injury: Experiences of addiction on the subreddit r/selfharm

Himelein-Wachowiak

Giorgi

Kwarteng

et al. 2022

JBA

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Background & Aims Previous studies have shown that nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI) has addictive features, and an addiction model of NSSI has been considered. Addictive features have been associated with severity of NSSI and adverse psychological experiences. Yet, there is debate over the extent to which NSSI and substance use disorders (SUDs) are similar experientially. Methods To evaluate the extent that people who self-injure experience NSSI like an addiction, we coded the posts of users of the subreddit r/selfharm (n = 500) for each of 11 DSM-5 SUD criteria adapted to NSSI. Results A majority (76.8%) of users endorsed at least two adapted SUD criteria in their posts, indicative of mild, moderate, or severe addiction. The most frequently endorsed criteria were urges or cravings (67.6%), escalating severity or tolerance (46.7%), and NSSI that is particularly hazardous. User-level addictive features positively predicted number of methods used for NSSI, number of psychiatric disorders, and particularly hazardous NSSI, but not suicidality. We also observed frequent use of language and concepts common in SUD recovery circles like Alcoholics Anonymous. Discussion & Conclusion Our findings support previous work describing the addiction potential of NSSI and associating addictive features with clinical severity. These results suggest that NSSI and SUD may share experiential similarities, which has implications for the treatment of NSSI. We also contribute to a growing body of work that uses social media as a window into the subjective experiences of stigmatized populations.

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“…The final summary in this literature review of keyword studies of adolescent healthcare interaction is a study by Harvey and Brown (2012), who investigated adolescents' experiences of self-harm in a corpus of messages taken from the Teenage Health Freak website between 2004-2008. The study follows the same steps as Harvey et al ( 2008) outlined above: a keyword extraction was performed using the BNC as comparative corpus, which was followed by semantic categories being assigned to the keywords.…”

Section: Commentarymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The words specific to self-harm were identified and their collocations explored in the corpus. Harvey and Brown (2012) find that their analysis reveals several patterns and commonalities in adolescents' accounts of self-harm, information which provide important insights for health professionals into what drives rising numbers of young people to self-harm.…”

Section: Commentarymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We have already seen a number of these studies in Chapter 2, where these real-world outcomes relate to the end-users, who are generally professionals or patients. For example, a deeper understanding of a psychologically-motivated condition (e.g Harvey and Brown, 2012) or evidence of the severity of adolescents' anxiety concerning the revealing of confidences (e.g Harvey et al, 2008) can be used to inform healthcare professionals' training and to improve adolescents' experiences of healthcare. Many register studies have shown keywords to successfully reflect the characteristics of a register, and the approach seems to have greater sensitivity than some purely qualitative methods (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A corpus based, lexical analysis of patient information for radiography

Golini¹

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Despite the importance and the ubiquity of medical patient information in many healthcare systems in the world, we know very little about the lexical characteristics of the register. We do not know how patients perceive the information in the leaflets or whether the messages are transmitted effectively and fully understood. How a medical authority instructs and obliges patients in written information is also unclear.While the number of radiographic examinations performed globally increases year on year, studies consistently show that patients lack basic knowledge regarding the commonly-performed exams and show very poor understanding of the concomitant risks associated with radiation. There is, then, a pressing need to investigate radiography patient information in order to better understand why, and where, it is less effective.This thesis applies three approaches common to the field of corpus linguistics to uncover some of the lexical characteristics of patient information for radiography. The approaches used in this thesis are a keyword extraction, a lexical bundles analysis and an investigation of modal verbs used to express obligation.The findings suggest that patient information for radiography possesses characteristics more common to academic prose than conversation, although the high informational content of the register goes some way to explaining this and suggests that the reliance on these structures may, to a certain extent, be unavoidable. Results also suggest that the reliance on should to oblige and instruct is problematic as it may cause interpretation problems for certain patients, including those for whom English is not a primary language.Certain other characteristics of patient information revealed by the analyses may also cause comprehension, and while further research is needed, none of these characteristics would be evaluated as problematic by standard readability measures, furthering doubts about the suitability of such measures for the evaluation of medical information.An additional factor behind the increase in healthcare discourse studies is the huge rise in the use of the internet to search for healthcare information, to talk about healthcare both as a patient and as a professional, and to practise medicine. The ehealth or digital health market, which has a projected growth rate of more than 15% in the US, is driven by the prevalence of chronic diseases and government initiatives to deploy e-health (Grand View Research, 2018). In the UK, more than 80% of adults use the internet regularly with just over half reporting that they use the internet to search for health-related information, a figure that has grown by more than 30% over the preceding decade. (Office of National Statistics, 2018). The use of the internet for health reasons is of particular interest to language researchers who have studied patient-professional exchanges, including medical advice sites (e.g. Harvey, Locher & Mullany, 2013) as well as patient-patient communication via forums (e.g. Angouri & Sanderson, 2016; Seale, ...

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Health Communication and Psychological Distress: Exploring the Language of Self-harm

Cited by 11 publications

References 60 publications

Examining the Discourse of Mental Illness in a Corpus of Online Advice-Seeking Messages

Examining the Discourse of Mental Illness in a Corpus of Online Advice-Seeking Messages

Getting “clean” from nonsuicidal self-injury: Experiences of addiction on the subreddit r/selfharm

A corpus based, lexical analysis of patient information for radiography

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