Languages of suffering

Abstract

Human beings are meaning-making creatures, who not only suffer in an immediately felt way, but who can interpret and articulate their discontents through the use of language. The goal of this article is to map different languages of suffering that have been—and still are—in use, when human beings make sense of their problems in living. I argue that our current conception of suffering has been pathologized and biomedicalized with the diagnostic manuals serving as a significant source from which a diagnostic language of suffering emanates. I briefly present four other languages of suffering—religious, existential, moral, and political ones—that are today often delegitimatized by the dominant psychiatric language. Building on pragmatist and hermeneutic philosophies, my goal is to argue that different languages enable different forms of understanding and action, and that we need many different languages in order to fully understand the human condition.

Psychiatric Diagnosis in a Woman’s Personal Narrative: Possibilities of Semiotic Analysis

“…Considering that human beings are always trying to interpret their own experience through language, Brinkmann (2014) grounds his work in some pragmatic and hermeneutic framing. He agrees that linguistic resources function as tools that enable us to act and deal with the world, mediating the relationships between personal and collective cultures.…”

“…According to him (Brinkmann 2014), the diagnostic language understands suffering in terms of symptoms described in diagnostic manuals. Following this language, people are supposed to believe that there is a clear boundary between the normal and the sick and that it is possible to conceive discrete illnesses, which can be explained mainly in their biological aspects.…”

“…Recognizing the criticisms that traditional psychiatry has received from the social sciences, Brinkmann (2014) affirmed that critics often fail to comprehend the personal and "significant experience of being diagnosed, or the various roles that the psychiatric diagnoses play in the lives of the diagnosed today"(2014 p. 122). Therefore, trying to go deeper, the author proposed that it is possible to conceive the psychiatric diagnosis as a semiotic mediator people use to comprehend themselves.…”

Diagnoser: Organisation, kultur og mennesker

“…Begrebet referer til en kultur, som er kendetegnet ved, at psykiatriske diagnoser og kategorier cirkulerer i den og ikke alene benyttes af fagpersoner (laeger, psykologer, psykiatere osv. ), men også af laegmaend og offentligheden til at begribe tilvaerelsens problemer, lidelse og menneskelig afvigelse (Brinkmann og Petersen 2015: 7-8 også andre -at vaere blevet overhalet og skubbet i baggrunden til fordel for det psykiatriske (Brinkmann 2014).…”

Mad or normal? Paradoxes of contemporary diagnostic cultures

“…Consequently, as critical social and cultural researchers, we can no longer, like the anti-psychiatric movement from the 1960s and 1970s (beginning with Szasz, 1960), simply accuse psychiatrists of promoting "medicalization from above" (saying that it is unidirectionally doctors and "the system" that stigmatize us as ill). Patients and citizens themselves are increasingly pushing for "pathologization from below", seeking out diagnoses as explanations of various life problems and using the vocabulary of psychiatry as a preferred "language of suffering" (Brinkmann, 2014a), i.e., as a way of rendering meaning to experienced suffering. My point is that the recognition of the emergence of diagnostic cultures as a widespread and pervasive aspect of contemporary cultural life should lead us to discuss the prevalent explanations in a different light: The psychiatric (we can finally find the ill) and the sociological (modern society is the source of the rising prevalence of mental disorders).…”