How many people have Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASDs)? Mental illness? Substance use disorders (SUDs)? The disease of addiction? …in the US? What about in Canada? The United Kingdom? Czechoslovakia?
We think we have statistics, but as everyone knows, statistics lie. As an example, think about surveying a community regarding whether or not a sports complex should be built by using funds from an increase in sales tax. Ninety percent of the community could say yes…if that survey were done in a sports bar; ninety percent of the community could say no…if that survey were done in a library. Statistics lie.
And counting isn’t any better, even when you turn that number into a percentage. This summer, I saw a research poster that indicated that, in California, over a twenty-year period, 29 of 2,000,000 babies – or 0.00145% – were born with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS). I’m still kicking myself for not taking a picture, so I have no proof that these are the numbers, but, you know, statistics lie, so it really doesn’t matter. The point is that many more babies than that…approximately 10,000 or 0.5%…were ACTUALLY born with FAS, not to mention the 90,000 or 4.5% more who were born with FASDs.
Our weasel words don’t help. Weasel words, per Stewart Chaplin in 1900, are “words that suck all the life out of the words next to them, just as a weasel sucks an egg and leaves the shell” (thoughtco). We rarely suffer from addiction; instead, it’s a “severe substance use disorder.” Say THAT to those with addictions. They will likely weasel out of the diagnosis.
As a culture, even professionals continue to trip over diagnoses of – or even mentioning – mental illness. It’s somehow called “mental health,” a “mental health issue,” “mental health challenge,” “mental health problem.” More weasel words.
“Scientific writing has become littered with weasel words that hedge, cause ambiguity, introduce conjecture and inference as reliance, resulting in a travesty of intellectual honesty” (Ott).
“Health,” by definition, is the state of being free from illness or injury, so the way we trip over our words and expect others to understand what we’re conveying is problematic at best: a “mental health issue” is saying that a person who is free from mental illness or injury has an issue with mental health. It’s an absolute oxymoron.
We don’t say “I’m having a physical health issue” or a “physical health challenge” or a “physical health problem.” We don’t ever talk about our physical health in the negative…because “health” is, well, HEALTHY. When it comes to physical health, we identify the diagnosis: I have a broken leg. I have diabetes. I have a sore back. Let’s do the same with mental health. A person has anxiety, depression, borderline personality disorder. Stigma causes us to not use the words, but there’s more to it. We sometimes don’t even HAVE the right words to use!
And here’s the rub…we are trained to pay attention only to what gets reported. If we knew the truth, well, we’d know a very different story. Just for starters, there are far more children in California who need diagnoses for Fetal Alcohol Syndrome!
But how do we get to that truth? Asking only goes so far, as do counting and observing. Testing…testing is what gets us answers. Another conversation this summer was around semaglutide and addiction: studies are being done to see if the medication also cuts down on problematic drinking, and preliminary results say it does. However, the problem was that all the participants, even those in the control group, said they were cutting down on their drinking. ANYONE can say less drinking is being done, but only a test will prove that. And, to be honest, some tests aren’t even good at THAT. A urine cup isn’t going to indicate whether or not someone drank in the last three weeks; it may indicate if someone drank in the last three days, at best.
Direct biomarker tests, using bloodspots, nails/hair, and umbilical cords, have a wealth of information in them. They won’t provide all the answers, but they will certainly get us closer to them.
References
Ott DE. Hedging, Weasel Words, and Truthiness in Scientific Writing. JSLS. 2018 Oct-Dec;22(4):e2018.00063. doi: 10.4293/JSLS.2018.00063. PMID: 30607107; PMCID: PMC6311890.
https://www.thoughtco.com/weasel-word-1692604
Guided by Guida 
Leave a comment