Classrooms, Stinky Labels, and Forgotten Diseases
Much of our world is socially constructed; including some diseases. These constructions deeply affect how we live and how we treat others.
Much of our world is socially constructed; including some diseases. These constructions deeply affect how we live and how we treat others.
When I used to teach I would start the unit on genetics by describing a few genetic diseases and then I asked the following question:
Should we eliminate genetic diseases?
Every single time I asked
Every single hand shot up.
Unanimously, they agreed.
Often they were enthusiastic.
I envied them. I envied the simplicity with which they viewed the world. Something, I suspect I ruined.
After a short dramatic pause, I would stare silently at them, I would take a deep breath and then I asked the following question:
“What is a disease”?
For them the answer was simple and obvious — a disease was something that made you sick and you did not want to have.
I would spend the rest of the lesson problematizing the idea of diseases. We would discuss how certain behaviors we now see as normal were once considered diseases. Students would debate where to draw the line.
It is easy to forget that much of our world, including diseases are, to some extent, socially constructed.
There are a number of shocking case studies to choose from. One of the most appalling is drapetomania. In 1851, Samuel Cartwright published a paper where he suggested that slaves who wanted to run away were suffering from mental illness. Cartwirght thought that following “proper medical advice” could eliminate the “troublesome practice of running away”. Exploring the origins of drapetomania reveals how people’s worldviews can determine how they interpret phenomena.
Labeling people can affect how others view and treat them.
In 1973 Rosenhan published an experiment that questioned whether mental health professionals were able to distinguish between the sane and the insane. He concluded that once a tag is assigned to a patient, their behaviors are interpreted in light of their diagnosis. We have written about this study: Imposters in the Asylum.
Some conditions were once considered to be a disease and then were not. For example, homosexuality was listed as a disease in the DSM until 1973 (the DSM is the official manual for mental health professionals which defines mental conditions). In 1986, the US Supreme court ruled that States could have laws against sodomy. This decision was reversed in 2003 thereby making all laws criminalizing sodomy unconstitutional. The fact that this behavior was once but is no longer a crime, prompts to question which, if any, current crimes will be seen as normal.
These examples undermine our ability to gain objective and truthful knowledge about the world. Can we trust experts to interpret evidence when we know how they can be affected by their worldview? Do their methods determine their conclusions?
My students were troubled by the sophistication of these issues. Moreover, they realized that genetic processes are more complex than those they had studied. The world is complicated, which makes it so much more interesting to explore.
Authors: Christian Orlic and Lucas Heili contributed to this article. Christian has a genetic condition called neurofibromatosis. He used to teach/work in schools.
Originally published on Medium