Micro-área SO_04_04_03_14

comparable illness severity manifest different levels o f disability depending on how they conceptualise their problems...Illness may be defined so as to make the condition central to one’s

identity or more peripheral” (Mechanic et ai, 1994).

It could be argued that linguistic intervention in describing a patient as ‘a person with experience o f schizophrenia^ instead o f ‘schizophrenic’ is trying to minimise what is happening to the patients and society’s responsibility for it, enabling people to take a certain emotional distance from the social reality of the life o f these patients. By the same token, it may be argued that using

‘a person with an experience o f schizophrenia ’ instead o f ‘a schizophrenic ’ is a merely cosmetic change which would drain social discontent into a harmless channel sparing fundamental political and economic structures that promote inequality, as such creating an illusion o f progress. This argument sounds justified if linguistic intervention is defined and communicated as a mere demand for ‘kinder words’. Indeed, recent changes o f terminology have been sometimes determined simply by a discourse marked by common sense 'humane' concern. Though linguistic intervention can be deployed as a powerful discourse in support o f the stigmatised, it would turn into an instrument in the service o f stigmatisers if it is satisfied with just a change o f names in order to keep the stigmatised content. To prefer the use o f ‘people with an experience o f schizophrenia ' as opposed to ‘schizophrenics ’ will not be mistaking linguistic symptoms with the social reality o f the lives o f these patients if it is associated with intervention at the level o f social structures as well.

The type o f discourse inherent in linguistic intervention should contain an invitation for re­ consideration o f underlying attitudes in the context o f a wider political, economic and social struggle against stigmatisation. De-stigmatisation must be active at the level o f individual consciousness as well as that o f legislation, social policy, economy and social structures. Linguistic intervention should be an attempt to impose a new order on social relations by means

o f language and not on just language. This attempt consists o f introducing a line o f discourse which has to compete and come into struggle with other lines o f discourse in order to shift the ideological and political stances in society significantly. This discourse should tend to rectify the constraints that stigmatisers’ discourse exerts on thoughts, perceptions and socioeconomic conditions and provide people with a new instrument to communicate rejection o f the existing orders o f discourse and to reconstruct a new order through a variety o f practical interventions.

Although language can reflect reality and can reshape and re-construct it, it is by no means the only cause o f reality. Reality may be contributed to by social, political, biological and environmental constraints in the absence or in addition to language so the latter should not be privileged over everything else in projects for social intervention. Any over-emphasis on the role o f language is strategically unwise as what would be easier for a power-holder than to say “You prefer me to call them schizophrenia-sufferers ? Granted. I will! But I ‘m not going to live next door to them or employ them!” The under-emphasis is also unwise as it would ignore the likely constraints that language exerts on human thought and disregard the importance o f people’s everyday language as a port o f entry to the re-examination o f their own political attitudes.

Linguistic intervention is a tactic for making a meaning conscious and salient and, at the same time, empowering the stigmatised and asserting possibilities for change. It is to make people aware o f non-neutrality o f language and provide them with more political consciousness for fijrther action rather than be satisfied with a mere change o f usage which would divert attention away from the social and economic infra-structure. It is a prompt for attracting attention to social reality and the need for political fight and, in doing so, helps the public take notice o f what they do everyday, i.e., speaking as a means o f engaging them in debates about prejudices hitherto

unnoticed (Cameron, 1995). It is a tactic o f scratching at the surface while always aiming at the core, a method o f challenging people, the media, educational institutions, lexicographers, publishing houses, etc. and catalysing debates which involve people in a discourse o f value with the intention o f allowing prejudiced ideas to be shaken up and changes in attitudes to be promoted. The debate on a ‘problem’ in people’s language is likely to attract attention to something more malignant in social relations.

Irrespective o f who employs it, linguistic intervention challenges and invites at the same time: challenge to whoever resists the idea promoted and invitation to whoever might be sympathetic enough to the idea to join. It is a political rank making and recruitment, inviting a new way o f thinking about social relations, proposing a new political stance, setting the agenda for future actions and challenging those who are intolerant or insensitive to its messages. The tactic o f linguistic intervention is to declare the presence o f alternative stake-holders and pressure groups and to invite interlocutors to consider those alternative attitudes. It proposes sociopolitical alternatives which, by opening the way to new discourse routes, have as aim to split and fragment the opponents. At the same time, linguistic intervention provides patients with a new message about their ‘self as reflected in others’, i.e., their reflective self-concept and this would act as a new discourse in the dynamics o f social orders o f discourse available to patients about their social value, responsibility, and agency and open the way for their feelings o f well-being.

Cheshire (1984) relates recent changes in sexist language, e.g., the reduced use o f masculine generics to an improvement in the social position o f women which language mirrored (and, indeed, enacted). The discourse which favours the use o f non-sexist language both reflects and

experience o f schizophrenia’ instead o f 'a schizophrenic’ is a question about both the representation o f the speaker’s relation to the individual who is ill and also the enactment o f a new relationship by means o f that discourse. Although calling people who have schizophrenia in one way or another cannot totally resolve, on its own, discrimination, problems with employment and integration these patients face, it proposes an alternative discourse which both reflects the growing efforts at integrating these people, promotes reconstruction o f the value o f patients as a first step towards their gradual enq)owerment and enacts a political fimction. Yet, this enactment is not the same as sorting out problems with en^loyment, discrimination, etc. It is a step towards them Other enactments have to follow for the discourse to build up into more widespread social action.

Discourse is not always in the form o f language and de-stigmatisation is not just a matter o f changes in language. The discriminatory component o f the stigmatising attitude can be non- linguistic: segregation, distancing, depriving, coercion or confinement. Yet these are enactment o f some underlying discourse and are themselves discourse. Discourses can come in chains o f ever expanding related discourses. A linguistic discourse can lead to here a discourse enacted legally there to a discourse enacted politically. There is always a potential in concentrating upon one discourse, i.e., one aspect o f a social process o f seeming to reduce it to that aspect alone. In the words o f Fairclough (1989, pp. 233-4): “One must not reduce emancipation to ‘seeing through’...Even while we focus upon language... let us remind ourselves that social emancipation is primarily about tangible matters such as unemployment, housing, equality o f access to education, the distribution o f wealth, and removing the economic system fi*om the ravages and whims o f private interest and profit.”

Linguistic intervention is not uniquely a weapon used by the stigmatised, their advocates and those on the left o f the political spectrum. Contrary to prevalent views which attribute linguistic intervention, or so-called ‘political correctness’, to left-wing factions, it is extensively used by power holders despite their attacks on it when it is practised by the disinherited. Power holders systematically deploy linguistic intervention with the same aims as the stigmatised: oftering alternative ideologies to adopt, challenging the present one and constructing a new discourse. For example, during the Gulf War in 1991 the allied forces decided to use the phrase ‘collateral damage’ to describe the killing o f civilians in military attacks on Iraq. ‘Collateral damage’ was used as a way o f minimising the affective impact o f a more direct and objective description in terms such as ‘incidental killing o f women and children.’ By circumventing emotionally loaded words the allied forces’ spokespersons attempted to lessen the emotional impact o f killmg o f civilians and solicit alternative attitudes towards them. The engineered linguistic facade works on people before they get to ‘repair’ their understanding by cognitive work (supposing people would systematically make such effort).

Cameron (1995), though asserting the power o f linguistic intervention in challenging stigmatising attitudes towards women, misses the idea (p. 72) that the use o f ‘collateral damage’ is indeed a similarly powerful example o f linguistic intervention used this time by those in power to blur the emotional impact o f a more direct wording o f the facts. She falls into the trap o f asserting that this would not change anything in the impact o f the news on the hearers, and she does so as an attempt to criticize Orwell (1946) who believes that language needs to be direct and fi*ee o f euphemism. In doing so Cameron contradicts herself as elsewhere (e.g., p. 142) she expands on the idea o f how much can be done to attitudes through linguistic intervention. ‘Collateral damage’ is an example o f the use o f a discourse by those in power trying to divert social protest in the

West about the war (irrespective o f whether or nor that war was justified in the first place). This is how linguistic intervention could be used to dampen down possible resistance or public discontent. There are numerous other examples o f this nature for example the practice o f naming the atomic bomb detonated over Nagasaki as ‘Little Boy’ and that over Hiroshima as ‘Fat Man’. The choice o f vocabulary and grammatical structure presents the mind with reality fi*om a particular angle, giving it a particular shape, meaning and significance. It thus creates a new discourse.

The use o f linguistic intervention by stigmatisers and power holders is important as any attempt by the stigmatised in introducing an anti-stigmatising discourse is likely to be opposed by a countervailing stigmatising discourse re-introduced into the public order o f discourses and at times even colonising the original anti-stigmatising discourse. An example is the assertion by some that “Victorian hospitals must be re-opened to accommodate ‘schizophrenia sufferers ’ ”! This appropriation and corruption o f discourse o f advocacy organisations {schizophrenia sufferers) by power-holders is by no means an isolated example. A given designation can be used by both those in power and the stigmatised in such an attempt to create a different discourse. For example, the term ‘sex worker’ can be used by a prostitute to declare her job when she is questioned about it, in order to request a less morally stigmatising attitude towards herself without necessarily implying that she considers her ‘work’ on a par with other varieties o f economic activities. The same formulation can be used by a pimp (who exploits and stigmatises the prostitutes) in reference to the latter to suggest that he considers his enterprise an economic activity as professional as any other business. He then goes up to calling himself ‘sex manager’ further asserting that he is one o f those stakeholders considering prostitution to be an industry.

Mass communication networks are likely to propagate discourses to promote the cause o f the disadvantaged w^hen these discourses are embedded within a larger discourse in the service o f the state or power holders. Within the already established social structures "members o f the high status group.... control various institutions o f the communication network" (Labov, 1972, p. 179) and “given the nature o f the hegemony o f the dominant group, one does not need a conspiratorial theory to recognise that the dominant group is unlikely to subscribe to enhancing the situation o f the subordinate, without when necessary, simultaneously guaranteeing or strengthening its own position” (Williams, 1992, pp. 132-3). This argument seems plausible given the extent o f struggle for power among different social fractions (Dahrendorf, 1959) yet it becomes questionable when it is applied to intellectuals and advocates in positions o f power. Cooper (1989) argues that language planners are the first beneficiaries o f their efforts, for example, the feminist campaigns against sexist language enhance the influence of those academics and writers who can show others how to avoid sexist usages. The counterargument one can propose is that nothing prevents people enjoying satisfactions related to an intellectual or social activity while the repercussions o f the latter are, at the same time, o f benefit to society. Cooper continues “to the extent that the cooperation o f the mass is a prerequisite for the maintenance o f the elites and to the extent that benefits to the mass encourages cooperation with the elites, the latter are well-advised to channel the benefits to the former or at least give the appearance o f doing so” (Cooper, 1989, p. 83). One could respond to this recommendation by arguing that the invention o f electric bulb or the discovery o f universal attraction did not need to “channel benefits” to the mass or “give the appearance o f doing so” as the latter have actually benefitted the mass while they have o f course benefited inventor and discoverer as well. It is the degree o f our belief in the genuineness o f language planning that tells us if we can categorise the latter with other human or intellectual efforts which have been o f benefit to human societies. Indeed elsewhere Cooper (1989) mentions

that if language planning serves the elites it may also serve the mass, particularly in so far as it strengthens the individuals’ sense o f dignity and self-worth.

One can add that indeed language planning can be initiated by the disadvantaged like patients with schizophrenia themselves when requesting not to be called ‘schizophrenic’ as is clear from the publications o f organisations such as MIND and confirmed by the results o f my survey. When someone introduces himself as ‘Robert’ it is an odd, annoying or even hostile act to insist on calling him ‘George’ (Cameron, 1995). In modifying names originally given them by others, patients are asserting their right to be called by a name o f their own choice and create their own emancipatory discourse.

In summary, linguistic intervention, as a defence tactic against stigmatisation is discourse, i.e., social practice and its significance is determined by its content as a discourse. For it to be effective it should be only one aspect o f a multi-dimensional tactic towards de-stigmatisation which acts both at the level o f individual consciousness and o f social institutions.

CHAPTER IV

AN ASSESSMENT OF STIGMATISATION IN