The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has come out with a guide for how we are all to speak and write. This can be found on the website titled, “Preferred Terms for Select Population Groups & Communities.” It is clear that this list is being read and distributed broadly – from medical institutions, hospitals, scientific communications, doctor’s offices, schools and universities, as well as other US Government agencies and institutes.
The CDC is the arm of the US Government tasked with disease control and prevention. It is not tasked with correcting wrong-speak.
Now, how exactly this guide fits in with the CDC mission is beyond me. Here is what the CDC lists as their mission on their website:
Do you read anything in the above that suggests that political correctness or correcting wrong-speak is part of the CDC mission? When did the CDC decide that they should take on the progressive left’s cause to reshape American language (oh, I used that “forbidden” word -”America”, which according to Stanford University- that is now verbotten).
I dunno – Maybe there should be some sort of jail penalty for those of us who just can’t get it right. Or maybe, the government should just revoke social media “privileges” or stop people from being allowed to make payments via internet banking services, such as PayPal has done on occasion.
According to the website, the CDC has put together this very extensive “list” to protect people from “stigmatizing language.”
The problem is that the CDC evidently believes that there should be no social stigmas. That if one commits a crime, is in prison, is an addict, or is involved in behaviors that most find offensive or are illegal, it is not ok to use a term to directly describe that activity because societal judgment might hurt someone’s feelings.
So, the CDC is apparently afraid that we might hurt people’s feelings by using unapproved terms, and that this would lead to a threat to public health. This comes down to a new, popular opinion among mental health care professionals that “Harmful language ultimately increases stigma on the individual, which reduces one’s belief in the ability to change as well as their motivation to ask for help.” I went to Pubmed and tried to find data to support this hypothesis.
A quick review of Pubmed shows that it has over 1,300 publications with the keywords “stigmatizing language.” What I found was a lot of first-person stories and case studies about how healthcare professionals have either witnessed or been harmed by hurtful words. But what I didn’t find was clear evidence that calling someone an addict, prisoner, smoker, handicapped, underserved, rural and a vast myriad group of words that are now labelled as being inappropriate by the CDC actually do harm. Now, there must be studies out there? But I couldn’t actually find any, so I couldn’t evaluate the quality of the research. My basic search does imply that whatever evidence is out there isn’t very strong or it would be cited by a multitude of studies.
