Tag: (E) anxiety

(2019) Languages of care in Narrative Medicine [BOOK]

Marini, Maria Giulia (2019). Languages of care in Narrative Medicine: Words, space and time in the healthcare ecosystem. Cham: Springer Nature.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-94727-3

Abstract:

This book explains how narrative medicine can improve evidence-based medicine (EBM), making it more effective and efficient, giving patients better quality of life and offering more satisfaction to all health care providers. It discusses not only the disease experienced by the person who is ill, but also focuses on the context and the culture, and investigates how narrative medicine can make other disciplines around the globe more applicable, less manipulative, and more “scientific”. Only by integrating the narrative aspects can EBM become more effective and efficient, with fewer uncured patients, more satisfied patients with a better quality of life, and satisfaction for all health care providers.

Every chapter is divided into two main sections: the first presents the latest research in the field, with comments and interviews with experts, while the second section provides a list of practical exercises and tasks.

This is a trail-blazing book, bringing health care and “human understanding” closer than ever before. A key feature of the book is the use of NSM, which can help humanize the relations between sick people and the caring professions by offering a new “language of care”: Basic Human. This is the first book to take this perspective on illness and care. Reaching other people through shared concepts is an art which can help us at many times, but perhaps especially when we are ill, or care for the ill.

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Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners

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(1990) English – ‘Fear’

Wierzbicka, Anna (1990). The semantics of emotions: Fear and its relatives in English. Australian Journal of Linguistics, 10(2), 359-375. DOI: 10.1080/07268609008599447

This paper demonstrates that emotion concepts – including the so-called basic ones, such as anger, sadness or fear – can be defined in terms of universal semantic primitives such as ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘do’, ‘happen’, ‘know’ and ‘want’, in terms of which all areas of meaning, in all languages, can be rigorously and revealingly portrayed.

The definitions proposed here differ in various respects from so-called ‘classical definitions’; in particular, they do not adhere to the Aristotelian model based on a ‘genus proximum’ and ‘differentia specifica’. Rather, they take the form of certain prototypical scripts or scenarios, formulated in terms of thoughts, ‘wants’ and feelings. These scripts, however, can be seen as formulas providing rigorous specifications of necessary and sufficient conditions, and they do not support the idea that emotion concepts are ‘fuzzy’. On the contrary, the small set of universal semantic primitives employed here allows us to show that even apparent synonyms such as afraid and scared embody different – and fully specifiable – conceptual structures, and to reveal the remarkable precision with which boundaries between concepts are drawn – even between those concepts which at first sight appear to be identical or only “stylistically” different. Upon closer investigation, human conceptualization of emotions reveals itself as a system of unconscious distinctions of incredible delicacy, subtlety, and precision.

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