Cape Town - The bleak, ominous and pessimistic language and imagery around diabetes and people living with the condition affects whether or not people choose to get tested, and a global movement that South Africa has joined hopes to change this.
Local non-profit organisation Sweetlife Diabetes Community joined the global #LanguageMatters movement, calling for a “new language for diabetes”.
A simple example of this would be replacing the term diabetic, sufferer, patient, or consumer with person, person with diabetes, or person living with diabetes and disease.
Sweetlife co-founder Bridget McNulty was first diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes 15 years ago and had little knowledge of the condition at the time.
“Everything I read said you’re now at greater risk of blindness, amputation, heart disease, kidney failure, and nowhere in anything I read did it say ‘or you can live a perfectly normal, happy, healthy life with diabetes’. And that's why we started Sweetlife, to show that it is possible, if you have the right care, if you’re empowered, if you have the right education.”
The #LanguageMatters campaign aims to avoid reducing the person living with the condition solely to it.
“It was such a stark and horrible introduction into this condition,” McNulty said.
On why this was so important, she said: “It contributes really strongly to social perceptions, and social perceptions lead directly to stigma or the lack of stigma.”
Images portraying people with diabetes or the condition were also few and depressing.
Sweetlife then arranged for a stock photo photoshoot that was positive and fully representative of people living with diabetes and the condition, with 150 images now on Unsplash, an online photo discovery platform that can be accessed and used for free.
Diabetes is considered the number one cause of death in women and is the second in men, with one in two people undiagnosed, McNulty said.
“If we can start changing the words and the images that we use and talk about diabetes, it's more likely that someone, if they’re not feeling well, will go and get tested because they're not terrified of getting diabetes.”
The co-founder of SA Diabetes Advocacy, Kirsten de Klerk, said: “We believe that it is crucially important because there are so many people being diagnosed with diabetes today in South Africa and the first thing that they are seeing is very negative images, very negative speak about the condition itself.”