The Hidden Harms of Well being-Linked Metaphors

A metaphor is a determine of speech in which a term or phrase refers to anything for which it is not literally applicable—like describing another person as owning a “sunny” disposition or being a “wet blanket.”

A metaphor can capture a strategy in a vivid and memorable fashion, attracting attention and fascination. In investigation, it can organize suggestions about the capabilities and dimensions of a strategy, and create hypotheses about how it functions.

On the other hand, metaphors can imbue concepts with meanings that are inaccurate and unsafe. They can replicate and boost unwarranted associations with unfortunate connotations that colour the principles and the folks to whom they attach.

“Stress” by Any Other Title

For improved and for worse, metaphors are joined to many principles involving health, disease, and their psychological ramifications.

For example, the this means of “pressure” in psychology has roots in its use in actual physical sciences in the 1800s. Derived from a Latin word for tightness or compression, “stress” arrived to refer to variations in a framework like a bridge or setting up, made when an exterior drive, or “load,” impinges on it, causing destruction referred to as “strain.”

Based on this use, the term “stress” counseled alone for use by Hans Selye, who popularized the principle of worry amid psychologists. It also has formed how experts and laypersons alike assume about worry. This has experienced heuristic worth, producing strategies, hypotheses, and study, even if it is finally an imperfect design for human tension.

The Major “C”

By distinction, metaphoric meanings of “cancer” arguably have experienced a unfavorable impression. “Cancer” has origins in the Greek word for crab, which is attributed to the perceived similarity amongst the crustacean and the overall look of external tumors surrounded by leg-like blood vessels. Figuratively, the term “cancer” indicates invasiveness, destructiveness, and decay.

Some of “cancer’s” detrimental connotations may well have rubbed off from its namesake. It moves stealthily as a result of the system like a crab via sand, and results in agony as can the crab’s pincers.

Susan Sontag in contrast the connotations of “cancer” to those people of “tuberculosis,” to which threatening meanings ended up also connected right up until it was located to mirror a bacterial an infection. Sontag suggested that this discovery demystified tuberculosis, taking away considerably of its threat price, and negative connotations along with it.

Sontag expressed problem about the damaging impact of cancer’s metaphoric meanings on most cancers sufferers. She argued that it can direct to panic, blame, and avoidance, exacerbating the emotional effect of a cancer prognosis and dampening hope.

Favorable incidence and survival developments considering that the 1990s might have lessened most cancers stigma. In its place, people today with HIV/AIDS have been a concentrate on of avoidance and blame. Sontag and some others have also reviewed the function of metaphoric pondering about HIV/AIDS in this advancement.

Hearts and Minds

Coronary heart ailment provides an interesting comparison. “Heart” has a myriad of figurative meanings, together with passion, compassion, and bravery. But when it will come to heart condition, that the literal heart is a pump looks to have promoted the use of mechanical metaphors, as in “ticker hassle.” And with lots of of its issues stemming from arterial blockages, there is the phrase and image of “clogged pipes.”

Coronary heart individuals are at situations stigmatized by their situation. They can be blamed for it when it is attributed to dietary overindulgence or an angry temperament—but not to the degree that individuals had been affected decades in the past when the word “cancer” was often left unspoken and they may well not even be informed of their analysis, nor in the way in which people with HIV/AIDS have been stigmatized.

Having said that, metaphors of the coronary heart may perhaps have deleterious implications in methods unrelated to stigma. The idea of “stress” as a actual physical power, blended with an graphic of the coronary heart as a pump, apparently reinforces the perspective that the figurative tension of psychological pressure is accountable for elevating the true stress with which blood circulates in persons with important hypertension.

Definitely, psychological stress can briefly elevate blood strain, and might have some involvement in the progress of sustained high blood tension. But more than-emphasis on the function of stress could lead hypertensives to neglect the significance of eating plan or to acquire their medication only when they feel they have been under tension, somewhat than daily, as recommended.

To Cope with Disorder is to Cope with its Metaphors

The term “cope” has origins in an previous French phrase which means “to strike a blow.” It is now intently joined to the worry principle, referring to ways folks offer with worry and its outcomes. This by by itself may appear to be both of those fitting and harmless.

Nonetheless, Sontag and other people have expressed issue about a prescriptive stereotype in which cancer people are predicted to take an intense stance against their ailment. Labels this sort of as “fighting spirit” unnecessarily invoke the imagery of armed forces overcome, whilst the ideas of solution as opposed to avoidance, engaged coping, and self-efficacy would lend them selves similarly effectively as descriptors and are related with far more convincing principle and methodology.

Disease-connected metaphors may well just be a just a fall in the bucket when 1 considers that medical people can be mistreated for several other reasons, like racial/ethnic, and gender– and age-connected stereotypes and prejudice. And even when the illness is the focus, rather than social demographic classes, factors other than metaphor can be at participate in. For case in point, a previous editor of the New England Journal of Medicine elevated the problem that research on the wellness outcomes of optimistic attitudes and thoughts may well direct individuals to interact in self-blame when their ailment worsens.

A War of Text about Text of War

Not long ago, objections have been raised towards the metaphoric “war” to eradicate the coronavirus, subsequent its usage about other main wellbeing threats and social problems, as in Nixon’s “War on Cancer” declared a fifty percent-century ago. Considerations involve the plan that this language raises fears, encourages authoritarianism, and can have a stigmatizing result on those people affected.

It is incumbent on the researcher, health care qualified, information outlets, and general public figures to be thorough not to confuse metaphors with literal meanings, as very well as to be informed of other resources of inappropriate and perhaps counterproductive language and conduct in their interactions with and characterizations of individuals. For the lay general public, it is a subject to be addressed alongside with other types of well being illiteracy.

Bottom line: Occasionally a metaphor is only a metaphor. Practically.

Copyright 2023 Richard J. Contrada