A cross-linguistic analysis of mental health discourse in European parliamentary debates: a corpus-based study using ParlaMint

Purpose This study aims to examine how mental health is represented in European parliamentary discourse by analyzing patterns, frequencies and variations in mental health terminology across multiple European parliaments, providing insights into political attention to mental health issues over time and across different contexts. Design/methodology/approach The research uses corpus linguistics methods to analyze mental health references in parliamentary debates from 24 European languages using the ParlaMint corpus (1996–2024). A glossary of mental health terminology derived from Bupa (2025) was used to identify relevant terms across languages. The analysis examines variations by country, time period or gender while acknowledging methodological limitations in corpora regarding demographic representation for political parties, for example. Findings Results reveal significant geographic variations, with Northern and Western European parliaments showing higher frequencies of mental health references. A clear upward trajectory in mental health discourse was observed over time, with substantial increases between 2014 and 2015 and during the COVID-19 pandemic (2020–2021), when references peaked. Female parliamentarians appear to place relatively greater emphasis on mental health issues compared to their overall representation. Originality/value This study provides an interesting and updated large-scale, cross-national analysis of parliamentary discourse on mental health using comparable parliamentary corpora across multiple languages. It contributes methodologically through the creation of an open-access derived corpus specifically focused on mental health discourse in European parliaments. The findings offer novel insights into how mental health is conceptualized and prioritized in different political contexts with implications for mental health advocacy and policy development across Europe. A multilingual mental health discourse in the Parliaments corpus has been created.