Dealing with barriers in EU discourse of Mental Health Care

This chapter focuses on the ways in which EU institutional discourses of mental health care are recontextualized for the purpose of disseminating specialized knowledge. It specifically investigates whether language barriers occur in specialized discourse, assuming that comprehensibility and simplification are key factors for effective communication with the lay audience. The investigation is carried out on the grounds of a quantitative-qualitative analysis of different text types collected from the Health EU Portal, and adopting a concordance-based discourse analytical approach. Findings reveal how texts are mostly targeted to professional audiences, marginalizing citizens and patients through the use of inaccessible language which hinders effec-tive communication with the general public. The investigation reveals a noticeable difference among the texts in the EU corpus. In general, specialized discourse was found to be featured by legal language, notably known for its obscurity and ambiguity, thus resulting unintelligible to non-experts as no discursive strategies of support were identified. Processes of recontextualisation were implemented when other professionals (e.g. doctors, managers and hospital staff) were the direct recipients. In these cases, discourse was recontextualised to facilitate professional understanding by moving from specialised legal language to technical registers appropriately. The analysis of the online information booklet programme 2008-2013 shows a move towards the marketisation of the institutional discourse of mental health care. It is centred on self-promotional discourse as a counterpart of specialised discourse. Thus, its goal is to disseminate self-promoting content, rather than effectively cater for common people or patients, despite the occasional use of a less formal and simplified register.