It is easy to laugh at young people asking for sympathy because ‘I’ve got mental health’. I think I heard the journalist-turned-teacher Lucy Kellaway on the wireless recently noticing in a half-baffled way the tendency of pupils to call mental illness mental health. Mental health hasn’t quite achieved that meaning in standard speech, but it could. It is partly a matter of euphemism. Mad and madness are now hardly usable at all with reference to everyday circumstances, being reserved for different times and cultures, for King Nebuchadnezzar, King Lear or King George.
A mental case is ‘increasingly avoided’, noted the Oxford English Dictionary in its 21st-century revision of entries that required no such cautions in its 1989 edition. Mental hospital, it says, is ‘sometimes avoided as being potentially offensive’, as is mental patient. ‘Psychiatric is often used instead,’ it observes.
Of course a century ago, mental on its own acquired the colloquial meaning of mad.
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