Lord Peter Wimsey said to the nurse: ‘Now about the old lady herself. I gather she was a little queer towards the end – a bit mental, I think you people call it?’ This is in Unnatural Death by Dorothy L. Sayers, from 1927. The 1920s were the heyday of mental, which occurred then about 87 times in each million words. Now it has fallen back to about 66 in a million. We no longer speak of things such as mental homes, and mental patient, mental retardation, even mental illness, are, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘avoided as being potentially offensive’.
The curious consequence is that a positive phrase, mental health, is often used to mean ‘mental illness’. One can see how it happens. I saw in a newspaper the other day a celebrity that I’d never heard of mentioned, who had ‘an ongoing struggle with mental health’. Another paper recently referred to people with ‘cognitive problems, mental health or with a history of suicide’. I think it must have been their families who had a history of suicide, but the mental health in question was no doubt bad health.
Sayers used ‘A bit mental’ as a chapter heading in her detective novel. It meant, not a lack of mental capacity, but a kind of behaviour that was mad. I’m not sure nurses 100 years on use mental in that way. It survives, though, in everyday speech as a synonym for mad, crazy, wild, insane, sometimes in a good sense, as when a party is called mad. In some colloquial speech mental indicates anger or agitation. Nicholas Blincoe had a sentence in a novel in 1995 about clubbing in Manchester: ‘If anyone passes out from the heat or drink, anything, the bouncers go mental.’ A strange slang usage was exemplified two years later by the fictional Alan Partridge, who, thinking he had escaped from a deranged fan, shouted through the car window: ‘Yeah, no way, you big spastic! You’re a mentalist!’
The biggest confusion in the use of mental health now, though, is to suppose that it embraces happiness and comfort. There are such things, even among the most sane, as sorrow and unhappiness.
Comments