Stress discourse and Western biomedical ideology: rewriting stress

Putting Stress in Historical Context: Why It Is Important That Being Stressed Out Was Not a Way to Be a Person 2,000 Years Ago

It was not until the middle of the twentieth century that scientists and Western societies began to label the combination of physiological and psychological responses that people display when things are getting too much and out of balance as “stress.” However, stress is commonly understood as a universal mechanism that exists across times and cultures. In a certain sense, this universality claim is correct: the physiological and endocrinological mechanisms underlying the stress response are not a modern invention of our body. In another sense, the universality claim is potentially problematic: stress has become, but has not always been, a way to be a person. That is, the social practices, in which the physiological and endocrinological stress mechanisms are embedded, are not the same across times and cultures. Crucially, these social practices are not a negligible by-product, but form an essential part of the way stress is commonly understood and experienced. Against this background, one may still decide to use the word “stress” when speaking about other times and cultures. Nevertheless, one should at least be cautious when doing so for three reasons. First, using the word “stress” when referring to societies different from our own may create the impression of a similarity between then and now, which does not actually exist. Second, it may blind us to the nature of the differences between times and cultures. Third, it naturalizes a contemporary scientific concept, which is more adequately viewed as the result of complex social, historical, and societal processes. Putting the stress concept in historical context and acknowledging that its use emerged in a specific historical environment enables us to take a step back and to think about the ways that stress shapes our lives. In other words, viewing stress as a culture-bound concept can give us the possibility to reflect upon our modern societies, in which the concept emerged.

Drawing the Line between Sick and Healthy: Normality Constructions in Health Communication Contexts

In this paper we examine how traditional views of normality are negotiated, indorsed and resisted when talking about children with heart defects. Having as a starting point an ethnographic project that aimed to study knowledge construction when being pregnant or having a child with a heart defect, we focus on argumentation put forward by clinicians and parents in order to understand the forms that normality takes in relation to children's health and illness and the way that it is constructed argumentatively and linguistically. More specifically, we draw data from recorded doctor-patient consultations, ethnographic interviews and entries from family blogs and forums and focus on those instances where normality is negotiated as a means of providing a medical consultation or of taking and motivating decisions about the child's health and everyday life. The analysis is conducted by identifying content and logical topics in the data and showing how constructions of normality and alternative conceptions are constructed in discourse. Discourses are additionally related to discursive, semiotic framing and the realization of norms. Our results highlight a duality that is being painted both in the clinicians and in the parents' discourse when negotiating the illness and the accompanying risks in the child's everyday life. Some of the traditional norms being re-constructed and re-negotiated in the data are those of stigmatization, diversity, responsibility and freedom of choice.

How Is a Label of Borderline Personality Disorder Constructed on Twitter: A Critical Discourse Analysis

This research took a social constructionist stance and explored how Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is constructed by Twitter users who identify with this diagnostic label. Consistent with this position, a critical discourse analysis (CDA) methodology was employed. The data comprised two-hundred and twenty-five tweets. Tweets from professionals, or links to blogs, were excluded, in an attempt to ensure only personal tweets were used. Two interpretative repertoires were produced from the analysis: BPD as an existence of tension and BPD as a different existence. The findings indicated that authors were involved in a negotiation between themselves and BPD, which had an impact upon their felt sense of agency/control over BPD. Likewise, authors constructed themselves in opposition to individuals who did not identify with the diagnosis of BPD. Whilst this provided more favourable positions, it potentially limited access to healthcare professionals and services. The research highlights the importance of the terminology and language clinicians employ when working with clients and other professionals, as they may inadvertently disempower or stigmatise. As CDA does not assume equivalence between individuals' accounts and their internal experiences, future research may need to explore the experience of stigmatisation through social networking sites.

Keeping healthy! Whose responsibility is it anyway? Vietnamese Canadian women and their healthcare providers' perspectives

Understanding how healthcare responsibility is distributed will give insight on how health-care is delivered and how members of a society are expected to practice health-care. The raising cost of health-care has resulted in restructuring of the existing Canadian healthcare system toward a system that controls costs by placing more healthcare responsibility on the individual. This shift might create more difficulty for immigrants and refugees to obtain equitable health-care and put blame on them when they experience illness. This paper is drawn from the results of a larger qualitative study exploring Vietnamese Canadian women's breast cancer and cervical cancer screening practices. Interview data were gathered from 15 Vietnamese Canadian women and six healthcare providers. We will demonstrate that (a) despite the strong influence of individualism, Vietnamese women and their healthcare providers value both individual liberty and the interrelationship between individual and society; (b) limited funding and unequal distribution of healthcare resources impacted how immigrant and refugee women practice health-care. Thus, motivating and fostering immigrant and refugee women's healthcare practice require both individual and institutional effort. To foster immigrant and refugees' healthcare practices, healthcare policy makers and providers need to consider how to distribute healthcare resources that meet immigrants' and refugees' healthcare needs in the most equitable way.