Courage in Healthcare by Rahman Shibley;Myers Rebecca; & Rebecca Myers

Author:Rahman, Shibley;Myers, Rebecca; & Rebecca Myers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SAGE Publications, Limited
Published: 2019-11-08T20:25:33.418608+00:00

The ‘battle’ analogy and the ‘war against dementia’

The perception of living with a long-term condition has become strongly framed by the popular media as well as the specialist scientific press.

In particular, the history of the use and definition of metaphors can be traced back 2400 years when Aristotle described metaphor in his Poetics as ‘giving the thing a name that belongs to something else’ (McKeon, 1941: 1476). Metaphors have been described as a ‘lens’, providing us with special insights and data about the narrator and his or her emotions, beliefs and self-concepts, which are often unconsciously produced. Metaphors have been used about diseases and illnesses, and are fundamental to patients in perceiving, interpreting and defining symptoms, and motivating them to seek care (Johannessen et al., 2015).

When, for example, will we know when the ‘war against dementia’ is over? This is not an altogether frivolous question, as an MP once famously asked Tony Blair in Prime Minister’s Questions: ‘When will the war against terrorism be over?’ On 28 November 2013, about dementia, Jeremy Hunt had written in The Telegraph about dementia: ‘It is a truly horrible disease’. This set the ‘mood music’ for some of the G8 dementia conference. In The Loss of Sadness, Horwitz and Wakefield (2007) wrote that, while a depressive disorder can certainly be a devastating condition warranting medical attention, the apparent ‘epidemic’ in modern culture reflects the way the psychiatric profession (perhaps under the influence of pharmaceutical companies looking to widen markets) has understood and reclassified normal human sadness in the DSM-IV as a ‘largely abnormal experience’.

The popular metaphorical framing of illness as a fight, war or battle seems to operate on various levels. Dementia is generalised as a vast, natural or monstrous force that we must ‘fight’, and it is also located as a very specific condition that affects individuals in extreme ways. In both cases, the effect can make us feel both terrified and relatively powerless. As the late Sir Terry Pratchett OBE said: ‘People seem to think of Alzheimer’s as something rather terrible and dreadful, almost as if witchcraft is involved’ (Zeilig, 2014). Literally meaning ‘away’ or ‘out’ of ‘mind’ or ‘reason’ in Latin, the actual term ‘dementia’ entered the English language from the French demence via the French psychiatrist Philippe Pinel, who made notable contributions to the categorisation of mental disorders in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Over the centuries, the phenomenology of dementia has been causally associated with witchcraft, moral degeneracy, bad blood and a dissipation of vital energy from the brain, among other factors.

David Cameron’s opening to his speech at the G8 summit at Lancaster House on 11 December 2013 is interesting:

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