Jonathan Fine

I picked up Jonathan Fine's volume with some trepidation. From the table of contents I could see that he was using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) towards a discussion of psychiatric discourse. As one who has engaged in ethnographically-oriented ageing-related research (Ramanathan 1997) and more recently issues around illnesses and disabilities (Ramanathan and Makoni 2007; Ramanathan 2008), and as one who is drawn by discussions of societal and institutional constraints (Sarangi and Slembrouck 1996) around ailments, I have become increasingly convinced of the impossibility of speaking about the messiness and pain in issues around bodies and bodily breakdown in the language we have available in applied linguistics. What can the metalanguage that SFL affords say about the norms around ‘normal’ behavior? Is metalanguage what we need in order to address the default assumptions around psychiatric disorders? The answer, according to Fine, is ‘yes’, and now that I have laid down the volume to write this review, I have to admit to being able to see the point of his argument despite my initial skepticism. This book, while it contributes to the growing body of work in communication in medical and social work settings and encounters (e.g. Hall et al. 2006) also departs from it in its insistence on the importance of developing listening skills on the part of clinicians who make assessments about psychiatric disorders. So much of a ‘patient's’ life hinges on this skill, since the diagnosis sets in motion a host of treatments, institutionalizations, modes of operation that assume a movement of their own, of rendering the ‘patient’ and the patient's voice to the sidelines (Duchan and Kovarsky 2005). The volume clearly has clinicians as its primary audience.

Active listening · Applied linguistics · Argument (complex analysis) · Epistemology · Linguistics · Psychoanalysis · Psychotherapist · Skepticism · Sociology · Academic and Historical Perspectives in Psychology · Educational and Psychological Assessments · Medicine · Mental Health and Psychiatry · Philosophy · Psychology

• Alzheimer Discourse

  Ellen L Barton, Vai Ramanathan•Language•1999

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