What do they think?

My father recently spent the last few weeks of his life in hospital. At such a difficult time, He was fortunate to be in a small hospital that took his dignity seriously. I was particularly struck by  how few staff, across all different roles and levels of seniority used the sadly well-established patronising and infantilising, sing-song  voice when they spoke to him and other patients. This was in contrast to the acute hospital where he had first received treatment where most staff used it to a greater or lesser extent.

 

From the unfamiliar position of onlooker (rather than recipient) I found myself most interested in the dynamic created in small groups of staff working together, where most spoke to their patients naturally, respectfully, adult to adult; but just one or two of them would use ‘that voice’.

 

That voice, where every syllable is delivered just slightly too slowly through what always sounds like a painfully forced smile, over enunciated, and with an inflection that is almost sung as if forming a nursery rhyme or baby talk.

 

I couldn’t imagine how it would feel to be working In such a small environment, where most staff speak normally and a few speak to patients as if they are naughty deaf children with learning difficulties (there is of course no judgement implied here of people with learning difficulties, children or Deaf people, only of the attitudes that they have to put up with day in, day out. I couldn’t help but wonder what each thought of the other. If it is the norm in services where everyone talks like that, and strength in numbers makes challenges difficult, in those where it is not the norm, I wonder what gets said and what doesn’t.

Perhaps it goes something like:

The one group - ‘Why are they talking in that stupid voice? It’s ridiculous, they’re shouting, they’re treating the patients like babies. How can I stop them… Why doesn’t someone stop them? Why are they still working here.’

And the other  - ‘They’re talking to him like he’s normal, he might not hear or understand… they can’t do that, he’s disabled and in hospital. We’ve got to cheer them up – cheer ourselves up.’

 

Whatever goes on, it is hard to believe that neither party notices the different attitudes and behaviour of the other.

 

As a blind person who’s been talked to like that by all kinds of people throughout my life, I have never understood how people speaking in this way could not but hear and quickly check themselves. I don’t talk to dogs or small babies like some people talk down to me.  It happens to disabled people wherever they are (inside of health and social care services, at work, in ‘normal’ mainstream settings) in hospitals, shops, day centres, cafes, social work teams, leisure centres, buses, GP practices, pubs… and is used by people of all levels of intelligence and status. It is also colluded with and (overtly or covertly) sanctioned by people in all those establishments  at all levels.

 

I wouldn’t suggest that the use of that (frankly stupid) voice is the worst thing in terms of the discrimination faced by disabled people, but it is insidiously powerful in the way it draws unwanted attention to the recipient, it functions effectively to belittle and diminish. The feeling of being spoken to in a louder than necessary voice immediately draws attention that is seldom wanted, the sing-song twisting of reasonable requests and statements into ridiculousness, the way that that sung repetition of  words and phrases removes their gravity.