On metaphors for snow and depression

[tahnan]

Recently, Dreams of Wings posted a thought from Sy Safransky's Notebook in the June 2010 issue of The Sun Magazine:

What if psychiatrists came up with different language to describe the suffering of people who troop into their consulting rooms every day? Instead of diagnosing a young woman with “borderline-personality disorder,” how about “lost in the realm of the fluttering leaves”? Instead of “depression,” how about “buried by avalanche, still breathing”? And, just as the Inuit have different words for snow on the ground and snow in the air and snow that drifts, maybe we could have different words for tears: tears we’ll forget by tomorrow, tears we never cried but should have, tears that fall from our children’s eyes, tears that fall too quickly to wipe away.

I had thoughts about this quote, but I decided to refrain from commenting, other than to second someone else's comment about the ridiculousness of the "Inuit word for snow" myth. In a followup post, DoW expressed annoyance at the commenters' nitpicking over metaphors. As well she should; it's her journal.

This, on the other hand, is my journal, and while I hesitated to express thoughts about the above quote in someone else's journal, I'm more than happy to do so in mine.

DoW writes that, for her, the important meaning in the above quote is the idea that we can look at the world through more than one lens, and that the "poetic lens" can offer a useful variation from the "diagnostic lens". On this point, I have to differ sharply, in a couple of ways.

First, I'll say that for me, the Inuit-words-for-snow issue isn't nitpicking. This is my field; this is what I do. (DoW, I wasn't personally doubting your intelligence or your well-readness; there are many, many intelligent and well-read people who genuinely believe that the Inuit have multiple words for snow.) As it happens, though, I have serious reservations about the Sapir-Whorf idea that language shapes thought, that having new words for things will give us new insight into them, which is not only what the myth perpetuates but is also exactly the reason Safransky was using it as a metaphor. Discussing this hypothesis is a minefield, because it's easy to take too extreme a view, either that language has no effect on thought or that it absolutely and in all ways affects thought. While I'm closer to the first camp, I'm not willing to take that strong a position; I believe in the importance of things like gender-neutral language, for instance, because I do think that using "man" to refer to people and "he" to refer to a person of unspecified gender really does encourage speakers and hearers to think in ways that they shouldn't. (Note: "encourage", not "force", the latter being part of the second extreme on the hypothesis.) And I recognize the validity of poetry and poetic language; "validity" in the sense that using new words to describe something really can encourage us to think about it in a new way.

Nevertheless, the idea that we need "different words" for tears falls far outside my comfort zone. We can describe these different kinds of tears with the words we have (and indeed, Safransky does so), and I personally cannot see how, if my child is crying and, watching him, my own tears fall too quickly to wipe away, there is any benefit in being able to say to someone later, "As my son cried halialas, I cried karthrintles". I do not think it will make us more sensitive to the differences in our tears (i.e., no more sensitive than simply saying "As my son cried the tears of a child, my own tears fell too fast to wipe away"), or help us see the world in an exciting and important new way. The poetic language might—again, I recognize the validity of poetry, and I can see how it could be useful, important, empowering, to say more than just "As my son cried, I cried", to use fuller and even poetic descriptions. But I simply must object to the idea that having new words for these things would make the world a better place.

That's my first objection, the one for which commenting on Safransky's stupid, stupid reliance on Eskimo snow words was a kind of metonymy. My second objection is to the first part of Safransky's statement, that terms like "depression" should be replaced by "buried by avalanche, still breathing". Once again, I have no doubt that the poetic lens is a useful one for many people—I don't always find it so, but how can I deny that I've used similes and metaphors in my own fight against depression, both when thinking about it and when talking about it, even when talking about it with a therapist? I feel like I've run up against a wall; I feel like the wall is insurmountable; I feel like I should turn around and give up; I'm wandering lost, I have no anchor, I don't have a map of the territory. I can't find the spoon drawer.

But I do believe that not all lenses are appropriate at all times, and diagnosis is one of those times. I understand DoW's concern (in her follow-up post) that "to diagnose is to pathologize". But when it comes to medicine—to science—I want clear, universal terms that can be discussed in a clear and unambiguous manner. I read Safransky as saying that, because everyone's depression is different, each patient should be described with the terms appropriate to them, so that my doctor might describe the patient before me as "buried by avalanche, still breathing", while describing me as "pushing the wall instead of climbing". I considered the horror of having to tell a new doctor that my last one had diagnosed me as "distracted by fluttering leaves" and have her try to decipher what that might mean in my case. (Suddenly I'm the Darmok captain trying to talk to Picard.) The beauty of poetic language is that it's evocative rather than clinically descriptive—but that's also its flaw, when one is trying to describe something clinical. DoW makes perfect sense when she talks about the occasional need to "experience...depression in poetic terms" instead of as an illness; but Safransky is talking about having our doctors do that, and that, I think, is a terrible, terrible idea.

So you see why I didn't want to invade someone else's journal with these thoughts; these are mine, and not hers or even merely a comment on hers. But the more I looked at the Safransky quote (which I was trying not to do, but DoW's aforementioned followup post brought me back to it again), the more I needed to express my reactions to it. And here they are.

Comments

[cnoocy]

I think that when people say "have different words for 'x'" that they often mean "be able to distinguish different subtypes of 'x'". And that is a powerful thought in both the diagnostic and poetic spheres. I can imagine a taxonomy of mental illnesses, I can imagine a taxonomy of tears. Both would be useful in their own contexts. And having multiple lenses is not a bad thing in and of itself, as long as one remembers that different lenses are useful for different tasks.

[tahnan]

It's an interesting and valid point. There's a lot to be said for a more fine-grained taxonomy—let's say a taxonomy of depression, because of course "mental illness" is already broken down into various categories. So, certainly, "depression - self-loathing" is different from "depression - self-destructive" or "depression - paralyzing" or...whatever the taxonomy might be.

On the other hand, in the interest of not only science but of rhetoric, people who mean "taxonomy" should say "taxonomy". And I don't really think that's what Safransky meant at all here; he's already able to taxonomize tears, as evidenced by the fact that he does so in his last sentence. I think he really, genuinely wants different words for these things. And when he's talking about depression, I don't see any real sense that he wants a taxonomy as opposed to just different phrases for everything.

(Also, I hope I made clear that I don't think multiple lenses are a bad thing. As I said, I talk about depression in metaphor as well as in clinical jargon. "Different lenses are useful for different tasks" is very much my belief, and the thing that I think Safransky is most missing.)

[arfur]

Suddenly I'm the Darmok captain trying to talk to Picard.

YES! Thank you for going there.

(Note: I attempted to delete this comment here and repost it as a Reply to your original post, but got the message "OpenID users aren't authorized to reply to this post.")

[tahnan]

"Prozac and Zoloft, at the walls of Tanagra."

(Either I've got something set up wrong, or there's something odd about the programming. Fortunately, either way, some of the other commenters here can help fix it. :-) )

[jadelennox]

To everything you say here -- not least that DoW shouldn't be invaded if it felt like an invasion to her -- I agree. But most of all, to But when it comes to medicine—to science—I want clear, universal terms that can be discussed in a clear and unambiguous manner.

Also, to the idea that metaphoric language based on false but wildly held stereotype can't hurt, I'd quote you again: isn't nitpicking. This is my field; this is what I do.

[colorwheel]

a) yes.

2) ...born out of a desire to exoticize is another critical part of why it's not nitpicking.

[tahnan]

The history of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is fascinating and a little sad. Part of it, as Pullum documents in his article "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax":

What happened was that Benjamin Lee Whorf, Connecticut fire prevention inspector and weekend language-fancier, picked up Boas' example and used it, vaguely, in his 1940 amateur linguistics article 'Science and linguistics,' which was published in MIT's promotional magazine Technology Review (Whorf was an alumnus; he had done his B.S. in chemical engineering at MIT). Our word snow would seem too inclusive to an Eskimo, our man from the Hartford Fire Insurance Company confidently asserts. With an uncanny perception into the hearts and minds of the hardy Arctic denizens (the more uncanny since Eskimos were not a prominent feature of Hartford's social scene at the time)....

Pullum then quotes the following from Whorf himself:

We have the same word for falling snow, snow on the ground, snow packed hard like ice, slushy snow, wind-driven flying snow - whatever the situation may be. To an Eskimo, this all-inclusive word would be almost unthinkable; he would say that falling snow, slushy snow, and so on, are sensuously and operationally different, different things to contend with; he uses different words for them and for other kinds of snow.

That's the start of the exoticizing; Boas, who Whorf is citing, was making a point about how languages form words, and not making a point about speakers at all. Whorf, inflating the number, also turns it into a statement about the way Eskimos think, presumably without talking to a single Eskimo. Which is the "exoticizing" part.

Rescue workers in British Columbia are still searching for three depressed skiers....

[q-pheevr.livejournal.com]

I'm trying to make sense of Safransky's original suggestion. Is the idea to make up poetic imagery on the fly, so as to make better emotional sense of psychiatric problems, or is it to replace existing terminology with more evocative terms systematically?

If it's the former, then people already do that, as your examples with the wall metaphor illustrate. At least, we do that in appropriate contexts; if a doctor is writing me a note to say that a student should be allowed to write a deferred exam because she has been suffering from depression, it would be a violation of the student's privacy for the doctor to give me a poetically explicit account of her emotional state. All I need to know is that there is a medical reason for making academic allowances; if the student wants to tell me more, that's up to her. For some things, we need poetically rich emotional language; for other things, impersonal clinical terminology is very useful.

On the other hand, if the idea is to create a sort of standardized poetic language of mental illness, well, actually, we sort of already do that, too. Depression is a metaphor, or at least it was. Metaphors die, and the quickest way to kill one is to use it systematically. Poetic language is powerful because it offers startling new ways of thinking about things; that's why good poetry is hard to write (and sometimes hard to read, too). If we systematically replaced the term depression with buried by avalanche, still breathing, then within a very short time, people will be going around saying things like "Yeah, my doctor says I've got BBA-SB, so she's gonna try putting me on Prozac for it," and a little while after that, the question "What did BBA-SB originally stand for?" will start showing up in pub quizzes.

Re: Rescue workers in British Columbia are still searching for three depressed skiers....

[tahnan]

Thanks for making this point; it's one that occurred to me, but that I cut out of my post (which is just as well; you phrased it better than I could have). Where I wrote "I read Safransky as saying that...", I originally had "I first read Safransky as saying that..."; my second reading was your second reading, that the term "depression" should be replaced by the term "buried by avalanche, still breathing".

I almost went with that as the reading I thought he intended, except that not everyone's depression is captured by that phrase, which makes it less useful as a metaphor. And I almost discussed both, except that this post was long enough as it was, and I couldn't come up with another example of a frozen metaphor—it didn't occur to me that in fact "depression" is exactly that. But yes, this is very much to the point: we use all kinds of language containing metaphors that have long since frozen into place, and while they're still transparent if you think about them, no one thinks about them. (An idle search of a word list [for things starting with two four-letter words, on the grounds that they're likely to be common phrases] turns up things like "make ends meet", "head over heels", "rain cats and dogs", all of which were probably once visually evocative and all of which are now just things with meanings, things we don't even think about the component parts of.)

Like I said: far less eloquently than you put it. Also, your title cracks me up.

[tablesaw]

Nevertheless, the idea that we need "different words" for tears falls far outside my comfort zone.

Well, sure, but tears are your example, and one which we feel we have a pretty good grasp on. We've got a pretty good grasp on precipitation too, since we've been describing it since ever. Psychological conditions, and the experience of such, have a choppier history. Clearly, this is a field where new words and terms are needed, because those words are constantly being named and renamed in a way that tears and snow are not. However, those names are being chosen only by the medical professionals studying them, not by the people who experience them more directly.

As another person who's been diagnosed as having chronic depression by medical professionals, I do instincitively feel that there is a need words or terms other than medical diagnoses to describe psychological conditions. I do believe that those terms should be used by medical professionals when talking to those under their care who, very often, look to those professionals to describe things that very often seem so personal that they cannot be described to anyone else. These words could then be used in non-professional settings by the people who need to describe them to other non-professionals.

But I simply must object to the idea that having new words for these things would make the world a better place.

Again, I think that tears is an inapt example. If we were to talk about embarrassment, having a word for "painfully embarrassed for or uncomfortable about someone else's incredibly poor social behavior" makes communication easier. Maybe that makes the world a better place? But I'm also often struck by the word doroledim, part of Laadan, a language constructed by Suzette Haden Elgin in part to give a place for lexical gaps that women have in a male-dominated language. Doroledim is defined thus:

Say you have an average woman. She has no control over her life. She has little or nothing in the way of a resource for being good to herself, even when it is necessary. She has family and animals and friends and associates that depend on her for sustenance of all kinds. She rarely has adequate sleep or rest; she has no time for herself, no space of her own, little or no money to buy things for herself, no opportunity to consider her own emotional needs. She is at the beck and call of others, because she has these responsibilities and obligations and does not choose to (or cannot) abandon them. For such a woman, the one and only thing she is likely to have a little control over for indulging her own self is FOOD. When such a woman overeats, the verb for that is "doroledim". (And then she feels guilty, because there are women whose children are starving and who do not have even THAT option for self-indulgence... )

I do think that there are concepts whose exclusion from the main of language hurts people, and a lot of those concepts are going to be in this field.

I understand DoW's concern (in her follow-up post) that "to diagnose is to pathologize". But when it comes to medicine—to science—I want clear, universal terms that can be discussed in a clear and unambiguous manner.

I also doubt that medical terminology is as unambiguous as it pretends to be, especially when it leaves the realm of journal articles and enters into the dialogue between a medical professional and a medical nonprofessional in their care. At best, precision in overly jargonistic writing is achieved by leaving words to function more as footnote references. This is useful in an interlingual research community (which medicine aspires to be), but it can so widely disperse the responsibility for actually understanding a term that no understanding is available.

[tahnan]

What you say about the terminology of depression is interesting, and probably much of it I agree with. I'll not comment on it, at least not immediately, because I need to mull it over and see how it strikes me.

On the other hand, as a point of housekeeping: tears are not my example. Tears are Safransky's example.

[tablesaw]

Whoops. Sorry about the tears. I looked for the source in Dreams of Wings's post and forgot to doublecheck Safransky.