MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

When I first shared news of my son’s diagnosis of Type 1 Diabetes (T1D), I was faced with many uninformed comments, such as “Just change his diet” and “He’ll grow out of that, right?” … A documentary titled Dx:One features footage of an encounter between the father of a child with T1D and a sales clerk trying to sell an herbal metabolic booster as a cure for T1D … In her February 14, 2014 column, Miss Manners replied to a letter written by a traveling businessman who lives with T1D, comparing the checking of one’s blood glucose to a “bodily function” and advised the writer to perform the task “out-of-sight” in a “public restroom.”

This lack of understanding and acceptance of T1D is systemic and, I would argue, largely due to misinformation perpetuated in the media. Every day, we are bombarded with news stories that generalize all types of diabetes as a justly deserved preventable disease. However, more recently, we have seen an unlikely source of such generalizations.

During the last few years, the medical and health communities have embarked upon an aggressive public awareness campaign to combat the Type 2 Diabetes (T2D) epidemic that plagues the globe. While the public service announcements (PSAs) created to support this campaign are rooted in the very best intentions—to educate the public about potential causes and the dangers of T2D—these PSAs have had deleterious effects on awareness of and support for the Type 1 Diabetes community. Like the examples I provide above, these PSAs often generalize diabetes and rely on fallacious advertising ploys to capture attention.

This presentation will showcase three to four public service announcements created by national and international health organizations, and will show how the strategies used in these PSAs propagate misunderstanding and socially construct an inaccurate, negatively perceived identity for the T1D community.