5. T H E COMMUNICATIVE CONTEXT OF HEART DISTRESS: FAMILY AND THERAPY
I have been arguing that the meaning of an illness term is not constituted simply by its relationship to a 'disease', whether defined as a set of characteristic symptoms or as a physiological state. The meaning of an illness term is rather constituted by its linking together in a potent image a complex of symbols, feelings, and stresses, thus being deeply integrated into the structure of a community and its cult ure. And the meaning of an illness term is constituted as it is used in social interaction to articulate the experience of distress and to bring
about action which will relieve that distress. It is in the purposive use of medical language in particular institutional and communicative contexts that semantic networks are generated and change. Careful analysis of the use of the language of the heart in social interaction would help us to understand how the articulation as 'heart distress' of those particular configurations of stress I have described is effective in bringing about relief to the sufferer. Here I can only make a few suggestions.
Heart distress is primarily a self-labeled illness, rather than one for which diagnosis is necessary. While a person with heart dist ress is not typically exempted from ordinary role obligations, certain privileges are extended to a person who is recognized as legitimately suffering from a heart ailment. First, the sufferer can expect expressions of sympathy and concern in response to his/her complaint. Many times this is the only privilege or treatment granted. (Twent y-one percent of the cases in our survey were reported as having received no treatment.) Secondly, if the illness is recognized as more severe, the patient may receive some form of medical treatment: first a herbal medicine, then a drug, and finally a trip to visit a physician. The most common treatment by physicians is the prescription of vitamins (especially a B vitamin injection) or some form of tranquilizer (commonly valium). Thirdly, a person suffering from heart distress may be able to make demands on members of the household for behavioral changes. These privileges will be granted, however, only if the complaints are recognized as legitimate. It is precisely in this reciprocal process of the labeling or legitimation of the person as ill and the granting of privileges to the patient that negotiations occur.
Our cases exemplify this process. Mrs. B. resented her husband's activities, which were symbolic of a traditional or backward life style. Smoking opium, drinking vodka, gambling large sums of money, and spending hours loafing with friends are all status symbols used to characterize the decadent style of life of the traditional landlords and merchants in Maragheh. Unlike her husband, who came from this class, Mrs. B. was upwardly mobile from the traditional to the modern middle class. She saw her husband's behavior not only as a threat to his health but as a threat to the achievement of the status which she sought for herself and their children. Mrs. B.'s pointed jokes about her husband's laziness causing her heart aches were a direct expression of this feeling. And her early complaints of hea rt distress can be understood as efforts to negotiate changes in his behavior through the rhetorical use of illness language. Mrs. B. was given sympathy, medication , and visits to the doctor, but it was only when her illness became much more severe - a serious 'nerve disease' (maraze asab) - that she was able to negotiate changes in his style of life.
The first case, that of Mrs. Z., illustrates less dramatically the use of the idiom of heart distress to negotiate changes in a family's pattern of interaction. But it
is also typical in this way, for many of the stresses underlying heart distress are unalterable, based in t he broader struct ural context in which the whole family lives. Mrs. Z. and her children lived in two crowded rooms along with her husband and his pa rents because the family was poor. This basic cause they were powerless to change. Using somatic language, Mrs. Z. was able to voice her discontent and gain sympathy from her neighbors and the other women of the household, even from her mother-in-law with whom she constantly fought. Complaining of her condition to her mother-in-law and other women while her husband sat listening in the next room, she was able to ally the women, including her mother-in-law, as a means of influencing her husband. While there was little that he could do about the condition in which she lived, he was able to take her out to visit a doctor occasionally and buy her the prescribed tonics. In one case she was able to force her husband to make a more specific change. Mrs. Z. felt seriously conflicted between the fear of having more children and her anxiety about taking the contraceptive pill. When the pill caused her to become ill, she was able to coerce her husband to take responsibility for contraception himself.
Medical specialists play a minor role in this process. Physicians are most often consulted for heart distress, but being trained in cosmopolitan medicine they consider heart distress to be neurotic, as opposed to somatic, and thus not a real disease. Some young physicians in Maragheh recognize the need to allow a heart dist ress patient to talk about her problems. But the most common reaction is to listen to the patient's heart with a stethoscope, tell the patient "it is nothing, only your nerves", then prescribe a tonic or tranquilizer. This interaction, an example of the very limited patient-physician contract in Iran (Good l 976b), in no way begins to un pack the meaning of the complaint, to lead the patient and her family to a conscious understanding of the dynamics of the illness. The trip to t he physician and the purchase of drugs do serve a therapeutic function: the patient is allowed a trip out of the house and is shown special concern. It also inadvertantly serves to legitimize the patient's complaint. While the physician's pronouncement - "it is your nerves" - may simply be further mystification, his statement along with the prescription of drugs serves nonetheless to legitimize the patient's role and give her some additional support in her use of the illness to manipulate the social situation.
This perspective suggests questions for further research. For example, it is my impression that there is a general hierarchy of resort in the use of medical idioma ta in Iran to manipulate social situations. Heart distress is a relatively passive mechanism. The condition of being asabani ('angry', a state of unusual irritability and quickness to fight with others) and the quarrels which it generates is a more active mechanism, directed more clearly at the objects of the distress. Threatened or attempted suicide is a third resort and may be
consciously used to manipulate unbearable situations.1 1 It is used , for example, by recently married girls who are being abused by their husband and in-laws in an attempt to force their parents to allow them to ret urn home and ultimately to force a ret urn of the bride price paid in the marriage: Thus the relationship outlined between medical language, its purposive use in culturally defined contexts, and the semantic networks that provide its meaning suggest hypotheses which may be pursued in further research.