The Language of Health
An exercise is Deconstructing Language to Understand its Influence on Health Outcomes.
I recently took a photograph of our new CEO — an African-American man — for our website. The lighting wasn’t great that winter afternoon, and so after the shoot I reassured him not to worry — that I would “color-correct” the photograph.
We looked at each other awkwardly for a moment. He quickly brushed it off and said he needed to get back to work. I bit my tongue, and smiled politely having realized I may have just made him feel the way I did when he confused me with the one other Indian woman at our office earlier that week.
This story, however, is not about racism or color-blind racism — even though it’s part of the issue. It’s about language and how it influences our actions.
While color-correcting is a widely accepted term that seems unlikely to cause harm, it actually does in some contexts. And by simply being out there, it is available for use — good, bad, or otherwise.
Words like color-correct hold implicit judgments about what we as a society deem “normal” or desirable. And normalcy is intrinsically linked to what we deem healthy and “able.”
Anything that is out of the ordinary — a child with Down Syndrome, for example — is deemed abnormal or unhealthy. And our words influence this perspective: we use words like “condition”, “mutation”, and “treatment”, which are all loaded and usually have negative connotations or are at least used negatively in other contexts, to describe Down Syndrome. What’s more, we consider these words to be a perfectly sensitive and scientific way of describing individuals with Down Syndrome.
Conversely, we talk about “organic” and “natural” as positive traits, yet maintain a very limited definition of what these words ascribe to. For example, having blonde hair is natural, but being albino isn’t.
It doesn’t, however, just stop at being politically correct or refraining from using ableist language. Something more fundamental within our sense of health and normalcy needs to change, because it is negatively affecting our health outcomes.
With Down Syndrome, as with many other “medical ailments”, there is a spectrum, such as a spectrum of phenotypic outcomes/abilities. Reductive language that is heavily influenced by our social conditioning (and vice versa) ignores this spectrum, making it hard for individuals to receive and ask for the support that they need for their particular situation.
On a larger scale, medicine and health, in particular, often evoke the sense that there is a problem to be fixed, unless positively quantified as “good health”. It might be worthwhile to ask why we consider something that is a regular part of every single person’s life as out-of-the-ordinary.
This sort of messaging is also not exclusive to issues concerning health. In fact, a lot of loaded messaging used to describe health conditions stems from more mundane contexts. We continue to use and create terms that reinforce an exclusive and binary grander context for what we deem normal, appropriate, and as a result healthy. And this manifests in words like color-correct.
The question is not about how to be more PC. It is about what we can do to accept different states of health as opposed to creating a singular definition for good health. It is about checking for how seemingly harmless words stem from suppressive histories and how they influence how we unconsciously think of good and bad health, among other things. And, ultimately, it is about being cognizant of the fact that semantics do matter and can influence a much larger, more insidious message that leads to very real adverse health outcomes, both mental and physical.