Linguistic entrapment: medico-nursing biographies as fictions |
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| Authors: | Paul Crawford BA DipN RMN Peter Nolan PhD MEd BA BEd DN RMN SRN RNT Brian Brown PhD BSc |
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| Affiliation: | Doctoral Research Student in English, Department of English, University of Birmingham;Lecturer in Nursing Studies, Department of Nursing, The Medical School, University of Birmingham;Lecturer in Psychology, Psychology Group, University of Aston, England |
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| Abstract: | This paper argues that in their trainings health professionals are encouraged to use language naively as if it were a transparent medium of scientific communication We contend that language use, particularly in the field of mental health care, should be studied in terms of its social functions and attention should be paid to the inevitably constructive nature of language in patients'records, in order that a'fictional distance'opens up between patients and their records Recent developments in literary theory and narrative analysis can be deployed as theoretical frameworks to understand this process, and we suggest that more attention to the use of language should be included in the educational programmes for health care professionals to counteract the risk of'linguistic entrapment'or'incarceration' |
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