THE POWER OF WORDS

Theodore Dalrymple (a psychiatrist and doctor who has spent a long career dealing with inmates and patients) has an interesting perspective gained over a long life of dealing with some of the most banal as well as a few of the more extreme cases of mental health/pathology on multiple continents. His reflection in this case is on the changing meaning and uses of words and how these words are transforming the worldviews of those who use them[emphasis mine]:

 There is something to be said here about the word ‘depression’, which has almost entirely eliminated the word and even the concept of unhappiness from modern life. Of the thousands of patients I have seen, only two or three have ever claimed to be unhappy: all the rest have said that they were depressed. This semantic shift is deeply significant, for it implies that dissatisfaction with life itself is pathological, a medical condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means. Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite of being depressed). This idea in turn implies that one’s state of mind, or one’s mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one’s life, a belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward from conduct.

A ridiculous pas de deux between doctor and patient ensures: the patient pretends to be ill, and the doctor pretends to cure him. In the Process, the patient is wilfully blinded to the conduct that inevitably causes his misery in the first place. I have therefore come to see that one of the most important tasks of the doctor today is the disavowal of his own power and responsibility. The patient’s notion that he is ill stands in the way of his understanding of the situation, without which moral change cannot take place. The doctor who pretends to treat is an obstacle to this change, blinding rather than enlightening.