My Big Fat-and-Caffeinated New Year’s Resolution

Posted by Heather Yoeli

I need a coffee. I can’t write without coffee. Happy New Year. May 2013 be a year of love and blessings and decaffeination for you and all those whom you love. And please excuse the very inept deployment of the subjunctive in the previous sentence. I need a coffee, you see...

I’m sure I’m not the only one within Fuse to have made a New Year’s Resolution. I imagine that I’m not the only one within Fuse to have made a health-related behaviour-changing type New Year’s Resolution either. I am (deep breath) going to make fewer – alrightalright NO - trips to the friendly new espresso machine located at the local garage and I am (even deeper breath) going to put the money saved towards one of those cringworthily excruciating-sounding Mummy-and-Tot Dance Classes, through which I will instil in my progeny an enthusiasm (grit teeth) for exercise. And I’m wondering what New Year’s Resolutions others might have, and how forthcoming they might be in sharing them with a blog…

My vice. This is a caffeine molecule, apparently. Chemistry was never my strongest suit, so I’ll take its word for it.

Within most areas of health, healthcare and health sciences, there exists an ethos which says that professionals and researchers should distance themselves from their area of practice or study. If, for example, you’re a doctor or a PhD student with diabetes or bipolar disorder, it’s nobody else’s business at all and they can piss off if they ask you anything about it. You don’t go there because to do so would be unprofessional or self-indulgent or irrelevant or burdensome to others, in essence a transgression of Western society’s Cartesian boundary of subject/object, body/mind, Self/Other. In other words, our personal lives need neither to be affected by nor to affect anything we do to pay the bills. It’s all a stress-management technique or a coping mechanism or a survival strategy, and one with which few would disagree.

Within public health, however, ethical challenges emerge from attempts to uphold such distinctions. Even those of us who subscribe to the most deterministic and we’re-all-merely-victims-of-our-social-environment woolly leftie-isms would concede that we all exercise some level of choice regarding our health behaviour: we decide, for example, how much (if any) chardonnay we drink, how frequently (if ever) we disinfect our chopping boards and whether (if female) we turn up for smear test appointments. Merely by virtue of possessing some level of personal autonomy and merely by living in a country offering virtually universal health services, we are all patients (or service users, clients or consumers) of public health. And some of the choices we make with regard to our health will be visible or apparent to those with whom we’re working.

Within qualitative service evaluation literature produced on public health interventions in the Cowgate community, smoking is a case in point. Davies (1998) does not mince her words:

… some families spend a third of their income on cigarettes. The smoking message is one that the midwives repeat over and over again, and everyone, including social workers, seems to ignore it... 

Stacy (1988) puts it a little more discreetly:

Staff should decide whether to make reduction in smoking one of the objectives in their health promotion work.

In other words, if we can’t give up smoking why should they want to?

And if I’m wasting £2.30 a day on un-recycled paper cups of over-caffeinated beverages funding a monolithic rainforest-destroying global multinational, how can I think with any integrity about questions of ethics and sustainability with public health? I’m really [expletive redacted after long tea-fuelled discussion with editor] going to have to do this. Aren’t it?

So, before I put the kettle on for camomile tea in a vain attempt to assuage the shakings and cravings of my coffee withdrawal, would anyone else like to share what they’re resolving to do to address their own un-public health-worthy little vices? What’s your New Year’s Resolution, and why?

On tea, and what is normal

Posted by Heather Yoeli

There were two things which drew me to Northumbria University in seeking a Fuse studentship. The first was the refreshingly sociological and social justice based ethos within the health improvement focus of public health within the department. The second was the invigorating friendliness of its Coach Lane East canteen staff. And I’m writing this not to ingratiate myself to my supervisor nor wrangle another cuppa off my Go Catering loyalty card. I’m going somewhere with this, I promise…

One of the greatest contributions which the social sciences have made to the practice of health care has been their critique of fixed notions of norms and deviance. Whereas both conventional biomedicine and the biopsychosocial model assert the existence of an objective, positivist distinction between normality as healthy and abnormality as pathological or deviant, the social sciences tend to adhere to the structuralist or poststructuralist view that what constitutes the ‘normal’ is merely a social construction and thereby likely to change in response to a number of social, cultural or economic processes.

Nevertheless, it is my observation that academics from a range of disciplines of social sciences and health studying and working at a range of institutions possess a disturbing tendency to overlook this vital insight whilst operating a crucial instrument of research equipment: namely, the kettle. Even amongst academics with a resolute and impassioned commitment to language and terminology that is respectful, empowering, enlightened and anti-oppressive, there exists a tendency to express a preference for ‘normal tea’ (or sometimes ‘ordinary tea’). I would even contend that, were tea leaves to possess sufficient consciousness to comprehend the concept of prejudice, such a careless deployment of language would leave bags of Assam, Ceylon, Darjeeling, Earl Grey, green teas, redbush, peppermint, camomile, ginger, rosehip, lemon and numerous other blends feeling seriously discriminated against.

Certainly, such an unreflexively-assumed norm accords very closely with the way in which the UK beverage industry regards tea. Whereas Twinings and Clipper sell ‘English breakfast tea’ and Twinings also sells a cheaper ‘Everyday tea’, all other leading brands (Typhoo, Tetley, PG Tips, Yorkshire Tea, Cafedirect) simply market their product as ‘tea’. It is with Tesco own-brand basic of ‘Quality tea’ that the semiotics of this becomes clearest. However, I’d argue that social researchers possess a responsibility not to allow their attitudes to be determined by the global multinationals in control of the marketing industry. Peppermint tea must not be relegated to the deviant or abnormal.

The idea that the language we are given to use will insidiously determine our thoughts and attitudes is generally attributed to the polemic and scare-mongering of the literature of George Orwell. However, the idea has a rigorous and respected evidence base established through the ‘linguistic relativity’ research of Sapir and Whorf and more recently developed by Lakoff and Fairclough. Therefore, if academics within the social sciences can be manipulated by the tea manufacturers into talking about ‘normal tea’, it may only be a matter of time before they revert once more to talking about ‘normal people’.