mental home
1
6.1
- noun
- /ˈmɛntəl hoʊm/
- Archaic
:
manicomio
- We had to put Dave in a mental home because he could no longer care for himself.
Examples
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I just escaped from a mental home.
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I actually ended up in a mental home.
Blog text (17) -
These people belong in a mental home.
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People think I'm in a mental home?
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We said that you had a collapse... ...and that you were in a mental home.
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It is I who should be committed to a bed in a mental home.
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That's why they locked me up in a mental home.
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It was the best mental home in the province, what else could we do?
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So they've carted her off to a mental home.
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You keep doing this thing—your daddy's gonna send you away to a mental home or hospital.
Fiction book (1999)
Synonyms
125
5.6
A hospital for people with mental illness or intellectual disability who need long-term care
64
7.5
A hospital where people with mental health problems get care
42
3.6
A hospital that cares for people who have serious problems with their mind
38
2.8
A hospital where doctors help people with problems of the mind
26
8.0
A very noisy, chaotic place often used to describe a mental hospital or busy shop
19
3.0
A hospital that treats people with mental health problems
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly derivable from combining 'mental' (relating to psychiatric conditions) with 'home' (a residential care organization): together they naturally yield a residential institution for people with mental illnesses. Although 'mental home' is a somewhat marked or less common collocation in English compared with 'mental hospital' or 'psychiatric home', the compositional pattern 'X home' is cross-linguistically familiar and would be understandable to a B1 learner who knows both constituents.
Etymology
The phrase mental home comes from old care houses where people with mental illness lived and the words mental and home were used to show the place was for care and safety. So mental home now means 'a hospital or institution for people who cannot care for themselves'.