Furious Seasons

October 25, 2005

About the Word "Consumer"

I have said this before elsewhere, so I might as well say it here: using the word consumer to describe the mentally ill is stupid. My understanding is that the term popped up a couple of decades ago in response to public mental health patients who felt belittled by social workers who referred to them as clients. I'm not sure why that would be an oppressive term, but people do find oppression in the oddest places. Whatever the case, I find the term consumer to be evasive and non-descriptive. Are we fighting for our rights to shop at Wal-Mart? Hell, let's be honest: We are patients, mental health patients, and there is nothing wrong or oppressive about the term patient. So let's drop the politically-correct b.s. and get on with life, shall we?

Posted by Philip Dawdy at October 25, 2005 10:59 PM

del.icio.us Digg it reddit

Comments

I HATE the term 'patient'! I hate it!

Before my whole hospital thing, I was a STUDENT. Just a student. And I loved it. I loved being a student. I loved it when my teacher would hand out an assignment and it would say somthing like, "The objective of this paper is for students to be able to compare the character traits...." Now that was cool.

Along the road however, I was hosptialized in the psych unit. But it was a children's hospital, so we were all called 'kids'. "You can't join the other kids right now becuase you aren't being safe," are the kinds of things staff would say. Or "You have to remember that the other kids here are trying to sleep," or "you can play with the other kids but you can't be throwing blocks at them." Anyway, I didn't mind this terminology at all -- as it all seemed so normal. We were just normal kids, normal people.

But then I got shipped down to the psych unit at UCLA Medical Center. And remember, I was in one of the adoclescent units, so it wasn't like there were 40 year olds or anything. But now, all of a sudden, the staff were calling all of us 'patients'. YUCK! "Are you making friends with the other patients?" one of the nurses once asked me. What the hell?! I wanted to say. Is that what you think we are, 'patients'? Some stupid, crazy, pathetic, worthless patients? It really seemed very demeaning -- it seemed as if by calling us 'patients' we were in some way less than they, that we were underneath them, that we were just a bunch of sick people. I hated it! I hated it so much!

Anyway, I probably reacted a little too strongly to that word, but now I just can't stand it. I don't want to be a patient, I want more than anything NOT to be a patient...I just want to be normal. For you people who have never been in the hosptial, I could see how you could be coming from a different point of view, but for us who have been in the hosptial for eons of time...it makes us sound as if we're sick, pathetic, worthless people. And I don't want to be a sick, pathetic, worthless person -- I want to be NORMAL.

So please, call me a student, call me a writer, call me a journalist, call me a kid, call me a consumer, call me whatever the hell you want, but DON'T call me a patient -- I just have really negative associations with that word.

I am anything BUT a patient!!!

Posted by: Gwen Davis at October 26, 2005 08:39 PM

how about cub reporter??!! jk. :P

Posted by: Dawdy at October 26, 2005 10:04 PM