Mental Health Metaphors

The words we reach for to describe depression, anxiety, and recovery carry assumptions about what those experiences are, what causes them, and what might help. This project, at the pre-funding stage when I was involved, sets out to investigate systematically what metaphors are used in mental health policy, practice, lived experience narratives, social media, and AI language models, and what effects those metaphors have on how young people understand and approach their own wellbeing.

The metaphors we use for mental health are not neutral. These framings shape how young people feel about themselves and what they think help might look like.

The Research

The proposed study design has four components. A metaphor analysis will map the dominant metaphors used across policy and practice documents, lived experience narratives, social media (including Instagram, TikTok, and Reddit), and AI tools such as ChatGPT, identifying patterns and examining what effects these metaphors have on readers. An arts-based participatory phase will then work with people with lived experience to generate novel metaphors, using methods including drama, creative writing, visual art, and dance. A third phase will test the impact of these new metaphors experimentally, asking which are worth taking further. Finally, the project will co-create a Metaphor Manual designed to change how metaphors are used in schools, therapy, and policy, training practitioners to think more carefully about the language they use when offering support.

The project is designed to be international in scope: the long-term goal is to train people across different languages and cultural contexts to conduct similar research in their own settings.

The Workshop

The session I attended was a structured workshop to develop and refine the research proposal. It opened with a presentation on what metaphors are and how they work, the idea that complex or abstract experiences (depression, resilience, recovery) are communicated through comparison with something simpler or more concrete. Participants were then invited to share metaphors they had encountered or used themselves, and to reflect on their effects.

Several patterns emerged. Many common mental health metaphors use height or verticality: "rock bottom", "high spirits", "low mood", suggesting a fixed scale on which the person can be located. Recovery metaphors often emphasised forward movement: "one step at a time", "riding a bike", "it's not a race to the end". Resilience metaphors such as "bouncing back", "character-building", "powering through", attracted significant critique for placing responsibility on individuals to recover rather than acknowledging structural or relational causes of difficulty. Policy language, including phrases like "mental illness is a burden", was identified as particularly harmful: it can cause young people to internalise the idea that their difficulties make them a burden to others.

Discussion also addressed the social media landscape, with participants recommending Instagram, TikTok, and Reddit as key platforms for capturing how metaphors circulate among young people aged 16–35, and noting that metaphors can travel across cultural contexts through global platforms while retaining culturally specific meanings. The potential role of AI both as a source of metaphors and as a vehicle through which young people increasingly seek mental health support, was also raised, with participants noting that ChatGPT could both be studied and potentially trained to use more helpful metaphors.

My Involvement

I participated in this workshop contributing to the structured discussion and providing feedback on the proposed research design. This included responding to questions about which participatory methods would be most engaging for young people, what might put participants off involvement, and how the Metaphor Manual could be made most useful for parents, teachers, and carers trying to support young people's mental health.