Fostering Understanding: Some Considerations to Improve Communication Between Patients and Healthcare Providers in Mental Health Settings

Abstract

This project seeks to highlight certain basic problems thatthe use of specific terminology may create in the provision and understanding of information in the Mental Health ambit. The paper has been divided into two parts. The first one presents different theoretical basis from which some linguistic difficulties may arise. The subsequent section extrapolates these issues to an interlinguistic scenario in order to formulate proposals that may be useful to solve them through translation processes. The final goals of this project are i) to raise awareness among readers of the positive and negative impact that language may have on those persons suffering mental disorders and ii) to provide the basis for more accurate translations that may resultin a more fluent and effective communication among patients and healthcare services, either in monolingual or interlinguistic communicative environments where English and Spanish are the languages involved. In addition, we will suggest extending some of these  guidelines to closely-related disciplines such as interpreting.