Metaphor repositories: the case of the mental health metaphor dictionary

Abstract

In recent years there has been an emergence of online metaphor repositories. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we present a review and comparison of the existing online databases of conceptual metaphors, showing that although there are a good number of domain-independent conceptual metaphor repositories based on English texts, repositories that are field-specific and/or in other languages are still scarce. Accordingly, the second goal of the paper is to present the first metaphor repository specific to the mental health field, named The Mental Health Metaphor Dictionary. This repository is based on a Spanish corpus of first-person accounts published in social media (blogs and Twitter) by people suffering from severe mental disorders. We present the structure and the building process of the repository, and more significantly, we demonstrate its usefulness for a wide range of groups: professionals working in the field of mental health, public health communicators, family members or friends of people diagnosed with a mental disorder, the affected people themselves, and researchers of conceptual metaphors and discourse analysis in mental health.