Mental Illness and the Resilience of Deviance

Abstract

This article deploys mental health and illness as a strategic case study to explore whether and how cultural beliefs about deviance respond to dramatic cultural change. Through a combination of topic modeling and targeted close reading applied to a corpus of more than 100,000 articles from a diverse set of newspapers, I document Americans’ understandings of the relationship between mental illness and deviance between 1980 and 2020. Despite widespread destigmatization efforts as part of a mental health movement in the last two decades, mental illness is increasingly linked to violence in the cultural imagination and used to justify social control. My findings help explain persistent stigma around mental illness and underscore how explanations of deviance are resilient to change.