Person-first language versus powerful words
Friday, May 19th, 2023 02:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flwydI just posted this on a Burning Man mailing list in response to a document encouraging use of "person-first language" in the context of mental health. It collects some thoughts I've had for awhile, and I think are worth sharing more broadly.
I feel that using a term like "my neighbor who has autism" rather than "my autistic neighbor" creates a sense that autism is a temporary condition—similar to "my neighbor who has a sports car"—or is somehow separate from their identity as a person, similar to "my neighbor who walks with a limp." As someone who may be on the autism spectrum[1], being an aspie is a pretty core piece of my identity. No matter what I do in my life, I'm never not going to be on the autism spectrum[2]; there's no drug or therapy that will cure me of Asperger's syndrome. And for me it's not even a "side trait" like the fact that I have brown hair or am "kinda tall". Autistic traits like spatial-symbolic thought, deep interest in narrow topics, complex language use, and detailed rule systems are some of the things about *me* that I'm likely to emphasize if I'm writing my own biographic blurb.
(Also, autism isn't a mental illness, any more than being left-handed is a physical illness. It's a different way of processing stimuli and thinking about the world. Autistic people's brains work differently, but they're not sick.)
As someone who loves the nuances of language, I share the interest in adopting terminology which uplifts people facing challenges and moving away from insulting language. Unfortunately, I find the position of person-first language to be frequently underwhelming and counterproductive. A couple examples:
The document that D shared encouraged the use of "person who experiences substance abuse challenges" instead of the term "alcoholic." The former is fifteen syllables long and sounds very clinical, even sterile. "Alcoholic" is four syllables long and has a rhythm to it: two syllables end in "L" and the other two have a hard "C". The double hard "C" gives the word punch: hearing someone say "My name is Chris and I'm an alcoholic" has an impact in our auditory pathways in a way that "My name is Chris and I experience substance abuse challenges" does not. And a statement like, "My name is Chris and I have a problem with alcohol" sounds to me like a weasel word that avoids the full impact of what's going on; it suggests that "If I could just solve this one problem, I could drink like a normal person."
At a different event, some friends of mine run a Phoenix Circle for people in recovery. They identify as alcoholics and use that term, because they see it as a key piece of who they are: their brain responds differently to alcohol than typical people do, and they need to keep that awareness in place in order to avoid doing themselves harm by relapsing. And they were able to make significant progress in overcoming this challenge by recognizing their alcoholism and how it's something that's always going to be part of them. They're not going to stop being an alcoholic, but they CAN (and did) stop drinking alcohol. This way of framing things might not be the solution for everybody, but there are a lot of folks that it has worked for.
Perhaps the first time I heard about people-first language was a campaign to use the term "people experiencing homelessness" rather than "homeless people." The former is a mouthful to say (ten syllables versus four), and yet it still "others" the people in question. We don't use the phrase "people experiencing homeownership," we say "homeowners." We don't say "people experiencing wealth", we say "rich people." We don't say "people with high physical strength", we say "strong people." Despite a goal of changing language to remove stigma, this creates a lexicon of phrases which are said out loud only used when referring to marginalized people.
The document starts by saying "We have all heard derogatory terms used to describe
someone who has a mental illness. Here are a few to jog your memory: Cuckoo; Mad as a hatter; Screwy–having a screw loose; Bananas; Loopy; Crackers; Wacko (whacko); Loony; Nuts; Freak; Crazy; Weirdo." In my lexicon, several of those words are descriptive, not derogatory, and they have nuanced meanings. I will often self-identify as a weirdo; I've never thought of the word as being about mental illness and more about having interests and behaviors that are outside the mainstream. (Black Rock City is a place full of weirdos, and that's what makes it so fun.) Likewise, "freak" is often used as a term of self-identity, particularly when prefixed with a classifier like "music freak" or "climbing freak." To my ear, it's only derogatory if the speaker has a negative opinion of the thing the freak is into. I use "loopy" to describe a specific set of cognitive behaviors, which can be brought on by lack of sleep, independent of cognitive ailments. In my family, "crazy" is used as a judgement-free descriptive term for many of our good friends. In our house, "Bob is crazy" isn't a positive or negative sentiment; it's just a non-awkward way of saying "Bob has some significant mental health illnesses." And an interesting note on "Mad as a hatter:" the association between hatters and mental illness stems from the 19th Century use of mercury in hat making; it's a physical neurologic illness that manifests like a mental illness.
The way I think about social language, the goal should be to *change the negative perceptions of mental illness and substance use,* not to change the words we use to describe them. We can keep the psychoacoustic power of a word like "alcoholic" or "crazy" while speaking positively about the person. (My family thinks highly of many of our crazy friends.) The document says "Person-first language separates the individual from the symptoms they experience." This strikes me as striving for a sort of Cartesian dualism, that there's a self which is somehow independent of mental and physical sensations[3]. When I've had physical illnesses, I don't want to separate and compartmentalize those experiences: my body hurts, my body's not working the way I want it to, but by gosh it's happening to *my* body, not some avatar in the metaverse. Some of those physical ailments are temporary, and can be overcome through action, medical intervention, or the passage of time. Others will be with me the rest of my life: I have achalasia (a physical illness) and it's important that I remain in touch with my body when I experience trouble swallowing: the symptom isn't separate from me, it's part of me[4].
It strikes me that mental illness is even more personal in this regard: many physical illnesses are available to our normal senses: we can look at a broken arm or an arthritic joint and understand the physics of how it works, or compare it to other arms and joints to see how it's different. But our mental experiences are in a rich inner world that's not easily accessible to other people, and difficult to measure with our usual sensory apparatuses. A person may be able to overcome a mental illness, but that illness isn't something that's happening separate from the person: it's going on in their mind, in their brain, in their body, and in their daily life. And I want to honor that experience with a word that carries the power of the challenge that they're facing, not a long phrase that sounds like it's from a clinical research paper. The more short syllables with hard consonants the better. If there are words with negative connotations that we want to move away from, let's make sure to pick words that have a similar strength when we hear them out loud. I tend to find words with a germanic root carry more power than polysyllabic words that came from Latin during the Renaissance. And if a word is easy to say and has a good ring to it, people are likely to actually use it in the course of normal conversation.
Acknowledgement: my focus on syllables and phonemes here was inspired in large part by George Carlin's excellent piece on soft language.
[1] By the time I learned what the autism spectrum was I'd learned enough about my own peculiarities and how to interface with the world that I've never pursued a clinical diagnosis. I hear people talk about their experiences with autism and read descriptions of Asperger's syndrome and think "That sounds a lot like the way I think and behave."
[2] Depending on where one draws the edge of the spectrum, I suppose.
[3] The phrase "mental and physical" is also a sort of dualism, and I think we often forget that mental sensations are often closely linked with our physical bodies. One thing we learn as Green Dots is that giving someone water and a snack may help tremendously with what presents as a major mental challenge.
[4] If I disassociate from the sensation in my esophagus, I'm just going to have a worse physical experience in a few minutes.
I feel that using a term like "my neighbor who has autism" rather than "my autistic neighbor" creates a sense that autism is a temporary condition—similar to "my neighbor who has a sports car"—or is somehow separate from their identity as a person, similar to "my neighbor who walks with a limp." As someone who may be on the autism spectrum[1], being an aspie is a pretty core piece of my identity. No matter what I do in my life, I'm never not going to be on the autism spectrum[2]; there's no drug or therapy that will cure me of Asperger's syndrome. And for me it's not even a "side trait" like the fact that I have brown hair or am "kinda tall". Autistic traits like spatial-symbolic thought, deep interest in narrow topics, complex language use, and detailed rule systems are some of the things about *me* that I'm likely to emphasize if I'm writing my own biographic blurb.
(Also, autism isn't a mental illness, any more than being left-handed is a physical illness. It's a different way of processing stimuli and thinking about the world. Autistic people's brains work differently, but they're not sick.)
As someone who loves the nuances of language, I share the interest in adopting terminology which uplifts people facing challenges and moving away from insulting language. Unfortunately, I find the position of person-first language to be frequently underwhelming and counterproductive. A couple examples:
The document that D shared encouraged the use of "person who experiences substance abuse challenges" instead of the term "alcoholic." The former is fifteen syllables long and sounds very clinical, even sterile. "Alcoholic" is four syllables long and has a rhythm to it: two syllables end in "L" and the other two have a hard "C". The double hard "C" gives the word punch: hearing someone say "My name is Chris and I'm an alcoholic" has an impact in our auditory pathways in a way that "My name is Chris and I experience substance abuse challenges" does not. And a statement like, "My name is Chris and I have a problem with alcohol" sounds to me like a weasel word that avoids the full impact of what's going on; it suggests that "If I could just solve this one problem, I could drink like a normal person."
At a different event, some friends of mine run a Phoenix Circle for people in recovery. They identify as alcoholics and use that term, because they see it as a key piece of who they are: their brain responds differently to alcohol than typical people do, and they need to keep that awareness in place in order to avoid doing themselves harm by relapsing. And they were able to make significant progress in overcoming this challenge by recognizing their alcoholism and how it's something that's always going to be part of them. They're not going to stop being an alcoholic, but they CAN (and did) stop drinking alcohol. This way of framing things might not be the solution for everybody, but there are a lot of folks that it has worked for.
Perhaps the first time I heard about people-first language was a campaign to use the term "people experiencing homelessness" rather than "homeless people." The former is a mouthful to say (ten syllables versus four), and yet it still "others" the people in question. We don't use the phrase "people experiencing homeownership," we say "homeowners." We don't say "people experiencing wealth", we say "rich people." We don't say "people with high physical strength", we say "strong people." Despite a goal of changing language to remove stigma, this creates a lexicon of phrases which are said out loud only used when referring to marginalized people.
The document starts by saying "We have all heard derogatory terms used to describe
someone who has a mental illness. Here are a few to jog your memory: Cuckoo; Mad as a hatter; Screwy–having a screw loose; Bananas; Loopy; Crackers; Wacko (whacko); Loony; Nuts; Freak; Crazy; Weirdo." In my lexicon, several of those words are descriptive, not derogatory, and they have nuanced meanings. I will often self-identify as a weirdo; I've never thought of the word as being about mental illness and more about having interests and behaviors that are outside the mainstream. (Black Rock City is a place full of weirdos, and that's what makes it so fun.) Likewise, "freak" is often used as a term of self-identity, particularly when prefixed with a classifier like "music freak" or "climbing freak." To my ear, it's only derogatory if the speaker has a negative opinion of the thing the freak is into. I use "loopy" to describe a specific set of cognitive behaviors, which can be brought on by lack of sleep, independent of cognitive ailments. In my family, "crazy" is used as a judgement-free descriptive term for many of our good friends. In our house, "Bob is crazy" isn't a positive or negative sentiment; it's just a non-awkward way of saying "Bob has some significant mental health illnesses." And an interesting note on "Mad as a hatter:" the association between hatters and mental illness stems from the 19th Century use of mercury in hat making; it's a physical neurologic illness that manifests like a mental illness.
The way I think about social language, the goal should be to *change the negative perceptions of mental illness and substance use,* not to change the words we use to describe them. We can keep the psychoacoustic power of a word like "alcoholic" or "crazy" while speaking positively about the person. (My family thinks highly of many of our crazy friends.) The document says "Person-first language separates the individual from the symptoms they experience." This strikes me as striving for a sort of Cartesian dualism, that there's a self which is somehow independent of mental and physical sensations[3]. When I've had physical illnesses, I don't want to separate and compartmentalize those experiences: my body hurts, my body's not working the way I want it to, but by gosh it's happening to *my* body, not some avatar in the metaverse. Some of those physical ailments are temporary, and can be overcome through action, medical intervention, or the passage of time. Others will be with me the rest of my life: I have achalasia (a physical illness) and it's important that I remain in touch with my body when I experience trouble swallowing: the symptom isn't separate from me, it's part of me[4].
It strikes me that mental illness is even more personal in this regard: many physical illnesses are available to our normal senses: we can look at a broken arm or an arthritic joint and understand the physics of how it works, or compare it to other arms and joints to see how it's different. But our mental experiences are in a rich inner world that's not easily accessible to other people, and difficult to measure with our usual sensory apparatuses. A person may be able to overcome a mental illness, but that illness isn't something that's happening separate from the person: it's going on in their mind, in their brain, in their body, and in their daily life. And I want to honor that experience with a word that carries the power of the challenge that they're facing, not a long phrase that sounds like it's from a clinical research paper. The more short syllables with hard consonants the better. If there are words with negative connotations that we want to move away from, let's make sure to pick words that have a similar strength when we hear them out loud. I tend to find words with a germanic root carry more power than polysyllabic words that came from Latin during the Renaissance. And if a word is easy to say and has a good ring to it, people are likely to actually use it in the course of normal conversation.
Acknowledgement: my focus on syllables and phonemes here was inspired in large part by George Carlin's excellent piece on soft language.
[1] By the time I learned what the autism spectrum was I'd learned enough about my own peculiarities and how to interface with the world that I've never pursued a clinical diagnosis. I hear people talk about their experiences with autism and read descriptions of Asperger's syndrome and think "That sounds a lot like the way I think and behave."
[2] Depending on where one draws the edge of the spectrum, I suppose.
[3] The phrase "mental and physical" is also a sort of dualism, and I think we often forget that mental sensations are often closely linked with our physical bodies. One thing we learn as Green Dots is that giving someone water and a snack may help tremendously with what presents as a major mental challenge.
[4] If I disassociate from the sensation in my esophagus, I'm just going to have a worse physical experience in a few minutes.
no subject
Date: 2023-05-19 04:47 pm (UTC)Often, we will assign a term to describe a category of people or a condition (temporary or permanent), and at the time, it’s fine: descriptive, non-offensive, reasonably understood by someone hearing it for the first time. However, if the term applies to a marginalized group, the common usage of the term itself is what transforms it into a pejorative. Take your example of “homeless person” vs. the other phrasing, which is so tortured I can’t bring myself to type it. “Homeless” has a clear, literal meaning: the condition of not having a home to live in. It is not inherently pejorative, unlike predecessor terms that I heard often as a child, but are thankfully rare now (“bum” implying laziness or worthlessness, “whino” implying alcoholism, etc.). When I hear people decry the use of the word “homeless” as pejorative, I see it as the consequence of association with a marginalized population not a term that would contribute to marginalization.
My point is that language evolves over time, changing and changed by societal perspectives. I think we should continue to remove words from everyday use when they are damaging, but also be aware when it’s the social view of the group that taints the word rather than the word tainting the social view of the group. In the latter case, all we do is flee from the association rather than improve the status of the group we’re referring to.
no subject
Date: 2023-05-20 05:24 am (UTC)U. Utah Phillips had a fun classification: (He also loved singing Hallelujah, I'm a Bum and perhaps America's greatest champion of hoboes.)
For whatever reason, I've got a stronger association for "bum" to either laziness or incompetence than to homelessness. The strongest voice in my head for that word is post-war Brooklyn Dodgers fans yelling about Dem Bums as the team looses a close game.
I'm with you on language evolution; I'm glad that "bum" is no longer commonly used as a term for homeless people. It's not descriptive and definitely has a pejorative connotation.
no subject
Date: 2023-05-19 10:39 pm (UTC)A lot of autistic people have made the stance that they hate person-first language and that they are autistic people.
A lot of it was about seeing people who are often ignored or not seen as human at all as human by using person-first language. That article that I linked above said that person-first originated to fight against some of the parental advocacy groups that exclude people who have whatever it is that the group is formed around. I am pretty sure that the autistic community hates Autism Speaks because there is a lot of enabling of parents who want to harm their disabled children in parental advocacy groups. When autism groups are built around autistic people, money would not have been wasted on "Let's cure autism" stuff.
There is this paper called "Unsheltered homelessness in urban parks: Perspectives on environment, health, and justice in Salt Lake City, Utah." I read it when I was doing NAACP stuff, and I believe it is about seeing homeless people as trash, just something to be cleaned up as opposed to actual humans.