Your Story Matters: Analysis of Emotional Discourse in Patient-Produced Mental Health Texts in English
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.4151/S0718-09342026012001389Keywords:
corpus linguistics, emotions, mental health, patients, sentiment analysisAbstract
Mental health can sometimes be a taboo topic, although public debate on the subject has recently increased. This study focuses on the analysis of emotional discourse in English-language texts written by patients about their experiences with mental health issues. This paper has two main objectives: to analyze the expression of emotions and emotional load in texts written in English by patients with mental health problems and to explore the strengths and limitations of the tools and approaches used for analyzing this type of text. To achieve these objectives, an English-language text corpus was compiled and analyzed using three approaches: (1) Lingmotif (Moreno-Ortiz, 2017), a sentiment analysis tool; (2) the proposal by Hermán-Carvajal (2025) for lemma analysis based on hedonic valence and activation intensity; and (3) the methodology by Láinez Ramos-Bossini and Tercedor Sánchez (2021) on hedonic valence in emotional terms. The results indicate that the emotional discourse in these texts shows a slight negative tendency and reveal how the different analysis methods complement each other.
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