Читать книгу Finding Jesus in the Storm - John Swinton - Страница 17
THE PROBLEM OF THIN DESCRIPTIONS
ОглавлениеThere are different kinds of descriptions, depending on the angle from which one looks at a phenomenon, but there are also different types of descriptions. In his book The Interpretation of Cultures, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz presents us with the idea of thick and thin descriptions.5 A thin description provides us with the minimum amount of information necessary to describe a situation or context. A survey, for example, provides a thin account of a phenomenon insofar as it captures only certain statistical aspects and provides no contextual, relational, experiential, or cultural information. Statistics also provide thin descriptions. So, for example, we might note that one in four people will experience mental health challenges over a lifetime. This emphasizes at a general level the fact that mental health challenges are a significant issue in the population. However, this statistic tells us very little about the particularities of either the one or the four. Thin descriptions provide us with high-level insights but no low-level details. Another example might be Google Translate, a web-based program that translates typed words into a different language. Through this process, you do get a rough understanding of what words mean in other languages, but that understanding is extremely limited and can even be quite badly skewed. It is an understanding of language stripped of culture, experience, history, or linguistic subtleties and idioms. It is too thin to provide more than a very basic level of insight into the language.
As we enter the world of mental health, it will quickly become clear that thin descriptions abound, both within public conceptions of people’s experiences and within the mental health professions. In what follows, I examine four key areas where thin descriptions have become particularly problematic:
1 Stigma
2 The DSM diagnostic system
3 The turn to biology
4 The field of spirituality in mental health care