The Language That Silences You — In Medicine and Beyond

I’m Clare Ashley, a former allied health care professional with an MA in social sciences.

For two decades I heard the story from my own patients. Then I became the patient myself.

With a serious, potentially life-threatening autoimmune disease, I experienced the reality — that the words narrated by this system, and many others, hide an insidious truth.

I became the ethnographer of my own experience, documenting what was happening. I’m a researcher, so I did what researchers do — I researched how language, the very thing that should give humanity its connection and greatness, has been turned into a tool to distort, silence and weaponise the very words that should be helping.