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This study examines the recovery experiences of students at a university college in the Netherlands during an outbreak of COVID-19 in the spring of 2022. University policy was based on the conception of COVID-19 as short-term, with a defined recovery timeline. Despite perceptions that young people face lower risks for prolonged recovery, our study reveals a different reality. Among 36 students with COVID-19, twelve experienced symptoms for over one month. Ten semi-structured interviews revealed heterogenous recovery experiences: good, mild, moderate, and difficult. We also explored how diverse recoveries interacted with academic work. Lingering symptoms ranged from smell loss to brain fog and prolonged fatigue. The unpredictability of recovery made it difficult to attribute symptoms to COVID-19 or academic work pressure. In the context of expectations to resume academic work, some students failed to recognise their ongoing struggles. An absence of conversation regarding recovery in a demanding academic environment renders diverse recovery experiences invisible. Our findings emphasise the need for a broader conceptualisation of COVID-19 recovery amongst young people and call for further research exploring the interaction between students' illness experiences and the fast-paced academic environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The condition known as chronic fatigue syndrome or myalgic encephalomyelitis (CFS/ME) is poorly understood. Simplified medical models tend to neglect the complexity of illness, contributing to a terrain of uncertainty, dilemmas and predicaments. However, despite pessimistic pictures of no cure and poor prognosis, some patients recover. Purpose: This study's purpose is to provide insight into people's experiences of suffering and recovery from very severe CFS/ME and illuminate understanding of how and why changes became possible. Methods: Fourteen former patients were interviewed about their experiences of returning to health. A narrative analysis was undertaken to explore participants' experiences and understandings. We present the result through one participant's story. Results: The analysis yielded a common plotline with a distinct turning point. Participants went through a profound narrative shift, change in mindset and subsequent long-time work to actively pursue their own healing. Their narrative understandings of being helpless victims of disease were replaced by a more complex view of causality and illness and a new sense of self-agency developed. Discussion: We discuss the illness narratives in relation to the disease model and its shortcomings, the different voices dominating the stories at different times in a clinically, conceptually, and emotionally challenging area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The perceived social liberalisation of Irish culture over the past ten years has significantly impacted Irish writing, resulting in discussions of formerly tabooed topics like psychosis, menstruation, and infertility. This shift is particularly evident in the recent rise in public interest in creative non-fiction writing. This article examines the rise in popularity of illness narratives: tales of patients' and care-takers' embodied experiences of mental and physical ailments in light of Irish medical-historical developments. Focusing on chapters from recent Irish essay collections by Emilie Pine, Sinéad Gleeson, and Sophie White, this article considers how writing about the gendered experiences of women in Irish medical and mental institutions can shape political action and contribute to the formation of radical new cultures of care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to public health framings of self-care as individualized bodily regulation, people’s transnational COVID-19 narratives revealed self-care to be a means of crafting social relatedness. In their self-care practices, interviewees drew on their richly structured field of relations, exercised dexterity and discernment in attending to them, and forged new webs of relatedness. Moreover, some recounted moments of radical care when they disregarded bodily boundaries in co-isolating with and caring for infected friends or relatives. These narratives of caring with rather than in isolation from one’s social entanglements provide an alternative imaginary through which we can consider future pandemic responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The end of a pandemic is as much a political act as biological reality. It is over not simply when case counts or deaths are reduced to some objectively determined acceptable level but also when, and if, the public accepts the stories that politicians and health officials tell about it. This paper has three aims. First, to develop the concept of a pandemic illness narrative – a public narrative that makes the experience of an outbreak meaningful to a community of people and explains when it will be finished. Using the case of the United States, the paper then examines how American state organisations and public health officials tried to disseminate a version of the 'restitution illness narrative' to make sense out of the COVID-19 pandemic and explain how it would ultimately end. Lastly, the paper describes the factors that made this narrative ultimately implausible to the American public. As most Americans are now seemingly indifferent about the pandemic, it has ended in the United States without ever actually being narratively concluded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Treatment of a child diagnosed with an inherited metabolic disease is a demanding task both for the clinicians and for the parents. The metabolic pediatricians and dietitians have to deal with scarce and dispersed clinical knowledge, while the parents must actively participate in its treatment, the bulk of which consists of a stringent diet and managing the risk of metabolic decompensation or intoxication. In this article, I characterize the medical epistemologies of a particular kind of "metabolic living," discussing differences and similarities between the clinical/expert knowledge of metabolic specialists, and the lay knowledge of parents of affected children. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Covid-19 is the first pandemic to be broadcast and photographed as it happens worldwide. However, despite the plethora of images on countless aspects of the pandemic, few media images have covered its more sensitive issues, such as the collapse of the healthcare system, the process of dying alone, or the disruption to funeral rites and mourning. Consequently, the visual narratives of the pandemic are biased. They lack images that show its more dramatic aspects. This affects not only how the public perceives and reacts to Covid-19, but also the visual evidence that will remain for historical memory in the future. With one of the world's highest case rates and most stringent states of emergency, Spain offers an interesting case study to analyse the pandemic's photographic narratives and its missing images during lockdown. This paper focuses on the presence or absence of images dealing with illness, death, dying and grief, as well as their ways of representation. It delves into the framing of particular visual narratives through an analysis of the images that appeared in Spain's leading newspapers, together with semi-structured interviews conducted with renowned photojournalists who worked on the front line to document Covid-19 during lockdown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through decades of scholarly analysis and application, the practice of illness narratives has been established as an effective therapeutic intervention for dealing with illness-related emotional well-being (Couser; Frank; Irvine and Charon). Scholars of illness narratives argue that the medium works to bring agency back to the body following the neoliberal relinquishing of one's life story in the patient-physician encounter. Contemporary scholarly work is mapping the growth of illness narrative forms from the traditional book to emerging digital-born narratives; however, there is limited research on the medium's intersection with virtual reality (VR) technologies. Working with Marie-Laure Ryan's theoretical framework of possible worlds theory, this paper explores the transformative potential of VR illness narratives for pathologized identities found when VR resists the call to fall into one of two categories: pure transhumanism where VR reality is emancipated from actual reality or an artificial experience that has no lasting effect on the self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines first-person narratives of a hysteria-like illness, referred to locally as 'clenched teeth (daant lag gaya)'. In Varanasi, India, the distinguishing sign of 'clenched teeth' is a tightly closed mouth, and symptoms involve seizure-like or fainting behaviours. I show how North Indian women improvised upon expressive genres of love-in-separation (viraha) to narrate their experiences of this illness. Drawing upon the symbolic structure of viraha to explain bodily signs and symptoms, patients of 'clenched teeth' asserted they were women who loved so deeply and steadfastly that they could not help but experience distress when separated from the person they adore. Simultaneously, these ad-hoc narratives concealed a traumatic kernel—an unbridgeable asymmetry between the sufferer and her beloved—that rendered the emotion conveyed not only that of love, but also of anger and resentment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1964, the Italian poet Alda Merini was hospitalized in a mental hospital in Milan as the result of a violent fight with her husband. Merini would spend ten years in and out of hospital, while her relationship with her family and with the literary circles in which she moved deteriorated. Merini's experience in the asylum is narrated in her memoir L'altra verità. Diario di una diversa (1986). Through an analysis of some crucial passages in the memoir, this article seeks to demonstrate that Diario is a work charged with both literary and historical value that deserves more scholarly attention. Merini's memories shed new light on the situation of psychiatric patients, and especially of women, in Italy before and after Basaglia's reforms on mental institutions. Demonstrating how the abuse that she suffered in the hospital reflects society's attitudes toward mental illness, disability, and women, Merini shows that the type of trauma narrative that is produced under institutions of coercive control – such as the mental asylum – will often be one of resistance to oppression. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Anne Boyer's The Undying (2019) reorients the writing of illness memoirs, in particular the breast cancer memoir. Thinking of the ill body as a "queer orientation," following Sara Ahmed (2006), I analyze how Boyer reconsiders and attends to different ways of narrating the ill body going beyond genre conventions. I consider how Boyer's memoir assesses the "crisis of care" (Fraser) in contemporary society as well as the role of the cancer patient in traditional breast cancer memoirs, where suffering is presented as a homogenizing experience devoid of sociopolitical circumstances. I argue that Boyer's use of (re)orientation of writing in her illness narrative is key for a different understanding of breast cancer that fosters collective action for the redistribution of justice and care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a discussion between two former colleagues and longstanding friends about the lived experience of illness and disability. In January 2013, Kirsten Harley, a promising early career sociologist was diagnosed with motor neurone disease (MND), a degenerative neurological condition with a typical life expectancy of 2–3 years. In this article, which is part interview and part shared reflection, we consider how Kirsten's knowledge of sociology has shaped her responses to the illness. We 'discuss' the process of meaning making, health system navigation, interactions with health professionals, advocacy, becoming a 'passive activist', the role of technology and what we, as sociologists, might learn from a life so dramatically changed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The use of technologies in health is changing the relationship between patients and their conditions. In the case of chronic pain, social media are offering these individuals a new way to talk about their experience. The objective of this paper is to identify how and why patients are using these online platforms for pain communication. Particularly, this study analyses self-expression practices of this disease on Instagram. Method: A sample of posts was selected from the platform following a multistage sampling strategy (n = 350). These publications were examined through a qualitative analysis based on multiple categories related to the experience of chronic pain. Results: Patients are using Instagram to give visibility to illnesses such as fibromyalgia or endometriosis. Moreover, these individuals talk about their condition in terms of chaos and uncertainty, using the narratives to construct a world that gives meaning to their chronic pain. However, men are largely absent from these online practices. Ninety-four percent of the publications included in the sample were shared by women (n = 329). Conclusion: Findings indicate that Instagram is changing the way patients live with their chronic pain. Considering the complexity of this condition, care providers could improve the assessment of chronic pain by paying more attention to the self-expression practices of these individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Africa is reported as one of the countries with a high burden of tuberculosis (TB). In response to the epidemic, the country's national Department of Health attempted to improve access to health care and TB treatment with a variety of intervention, treatment and management programmes. Although these interventions are necessary for the macro project of lowering TB infections in South Africa, their focus tends to neglect the particular stories of how TB affects particular lives. In pursuit of such stories, this paper considers how two women, Andiswa and sis Thembi, in Khayelitsha, Western Cape, juggle motherhood and illness. Drawing on a body of literature that focuses on illness as a biographical disruption, good mothering and the impact of TB on poor families in South Africa, this paper explores how TB disrupts mothering. It looks at how these women manage their identities as mothers and their relationships when infected with the disrupting TB. I argue that despite the disruption, their lives show that TB produces moments of burdening and moments of unburdening. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Undocumented Mexican immigrants have had to regularly confront a prohibiting health care system despite alienation, marginalization, and the threat of deportation. In this article, I explore the impact of political exclusion and alienating discourses on the health habitus of undocumented Mexican mothers through the narrative of one mother, Marta Garza, who finds herself at the painful intersection of political and medical alienation. Marta's narrative reflects an analytical framework that centers undocumented motherhood as a space of necessary resilience and strain, wherein she is forced to advocate for her children's health despite prohibitive barriers and dangerous potential consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Publisher and artist Susan Sontag has taught us to be aware of the fact that diseases are widely used as cultural metaphors. They are given a negative meaning by using repressive, stigmatizing, and horrifying rhetoric figures and images. This article tries to look at this theory with regard to medieval narratives about leprosy: leprosy seems to be the perfect example of a ‘meaningful’ disease, often connecting the illness with horrible symptoms, emotions like disgust and fear and religious connotations like sin or holiness. But leprosy is not only a matter of medicine and religion in medieval literature: narratives about leprosy characterize literary figures and determine plots and narrative strategies. They connect the disease with subjects like love and adultery, courtly virtues, and rulership. They also develop an understanding of corporealities, human relationships, and exclusion. Literary sources analyzed include German and French Tristan romances (Eilhart von Oberg, Ulrich von Türheim, Béroul, Thomas) and Ulrich von Lichtenstein's Frauendienst. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Publisher and artist Susan Sontag has taught us to be aware of the fact that diseases are widely used as cultural metaphors. They are given a negative meaning by using repressive, stigmatizing, and horrifying rhetoric figures and images. This article tries to look at this theory with regard to medieval narratives about leprosy: leprosy seems to be the perfect example of a ‘meaningful’ disease, often connecting the illness with horrible symptoms, emotions like disgust and fear and religious connotations like sin or holiness. But leprosy is not only a matter of medicine and religion in medieval literature: narratives about leprosy characterize literary figures and determine plots and narrative strategies. They connect the disease with subjects like love and adultery, courtly virtues, and rulership. They also develop an understanding of corporealities, human relationships, and exclusion. Literary sources analyzed include German and French Tristan romances (Eilhart von Oberg, Ulrich von Türheim, Béroul, Thomas) and Ulrich von Lichtenstein's Frauendienst. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A patient- and family-centred approach in paediatric health care is important because parents are involved in making key decisions about their child’s health care and advocating for the best interest of the child. Parents and family members are increasingly turning to the internet to find and actively share information about their child’s health care. Twitter is one of many online platforms used by parents of children diagnosed with cancer to share information related to their child’s cancer experience. Existing research suggests that there is a need to better understand the motives for using Twitter for sharing content about a child’s cancer experience. Furthermore, there is a lack of theoretical frameworks for characterizing those motives. In this paper, we identify key themes of tweets posted by parents of children diagnosed with cancer and align those themes with motives inspired by the well-studied Everyday Life Information Seeking framework. We propose a new motive in addition to those associated with the framework and suggest that information can be shared for endogenous reasons as well as to meet the needs of others. This paper contributes an increased understanding of motives for sharing information about a child’s cancer journey and extends a theoretical framework for building further knowledge in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Type 2 diabetes mellitus is an escalating public health problem in India, associated with genetic susceptibility, dietary shift, and rapid lifestyle changes. Historically a disease of the urban elite, quantitative studies have recently confirmed rising prevalence rates among marginalized populations in rural India. To analyze the role of cultural and sociopolitical factors in diabetes onset and management, we employed in-depth interviews and focus groups within a rural community of Tamil Nadu. The objectives of the study were to understand sources and extent of health knowledge, diabetes explanatory models, and the impact of illness on individual, social, and familial roles. Several cultural, socioeconomic, and political factors appear to contribute to diabetes in rural regions of India, highlighting the need to address structural inequities and empower individuals to pursue health and well-being on their own terms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Clinical social workers’ commitment to social justice makes them acutely concerned about discrimination and dis-empowerment, and thus they are sensitive to the impact of stigma on persons diagnosed with a mental disorder. At the same time, it is important to explore whether clinicians’ assumptions about psychiatric diagnoses as stigmatizing mesh with the views and experiences of those who actually receive and live with these diagnoses. To address this question, in-depth interviews were conducted with 30 individuals carrying a range of psychiatric diagnoses. Narrative and thematic analysis yielded several distinct narratives about living with a mental health label. For many participants, diagnosis brought validation; to be “named” was to be welcomed into one’s tribe. For others, diagnosis meant reduction and mistranslation. Findings raise questions about the assumption that diagnostic labels necessarily bring shame and/or loss of self-efficacy. Without minimizing the impact of stigma, clinicians need to remain open to discovering how each client finds meaning in the diagnostic experience. Based on participants’ use of deeply personal images, metaphor is proposed as a creative means for re-claiming identity. Implications for practice and further research are suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we explore how younger women in Norway construct their embodiment and sense of self after hysterectomy. To do this, we conducted in-depth interviews with eight ethnic Norwegian women aged between 25 and 43 who had undergone hysterectomy. In line with a broad phenomenological approach to illness, the study was designed to explore the trajectories of the women's illness with a specific focus on concrete human experience and identity claims from a subjective point of view. In analysing the stories, we encountered feelings of suffering due to the loss of the uterus as well as profound side-effects, such as menopause. However, we also found evidence of relief from being treated for heavy bleeding and serious illness. In order to accentuate the individual voices in these illness stories, we chose a case- oriented analysis in line with Radley and Chamberlain (2001) and Riessman (2008). From this, two main seemingly contradictory storylines stood out: They have removed what made me a woman versus Without a uterus, I feel more like a woman. We also identified heteronormativity as an unstated issue in both these storylines and in the research data as a whole. Acknowledging diversity in the way women experience hysterectomy is important for a better understanding of the ways in which hysterectomy may affect women as humans as well as for developing more cultural competent healthcare services for this group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study assessed the biopsychosocial impact of cancer on Veteran older adult survivors by garnering their accounts of their illness experiences. A narrative analysis of 73 cancer diagnosis and treatment stories reveals five "paths" Veterans are taking 18 months postdiagnosis. These paths indicate that cancer survivorship cannot be conceptualized as a one-size-fits-all experience but rather is a process of Veterans understanding and making sense of the effects of cancer on their lives. Our future goal is to develop a screening tool to help clinicians identify a patient's "path" to tailor survivorship care to meet specific needs. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since research on religion has historically employed a psychological framework of coping, sociocultural influences on illness identities are not well understood. This article explores the role of religion/spirituality in a diverse sample of seniors dealing with Alzheimer's. Interviews with 75 affected elders reveal that faith can promote “strength and hope,” “never feeling alone,” “remembering,” “keeping a positive attitude,” “contentment,” and “social and interpersonal benefits.” This protective aspect of religious identities suggests views of self that are far less compromised and of dementia that are far less medicalized in this predominantly African American sample than previous studies with white counterparts report. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hope has been identified as a key attribute required for neurological rehabilitation. Expressions of hope form the basis for patient narratives within this context. The purpose of this study was to use patient's experience of hope as a way of understanding narrative types. This study looks at three different neurological conditions: spinal cord injury, stroke and multiple sclerosis. Using a meta-ethnographical method, eight narrative macrostructures were identified by three groups of hope: (1) hope as a dichotomy, (2) hope as a paradox and (3) transcendence. The discussion provides further details of these groups and establishes how therapeutic emplotment may influence and guide narratives within neurological rehabilitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this essay is to explore several first-person narratives that chart the experience of a stroke, namely Jean-Dominique Bauby's The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly, Robert McCrum's My Year Off: Rediscovering Life After a Stroke and Jill Bolte Taylor's My Stroke of Insight: a Brain Scientist's Personal Journey. The author uses her own invested viewpoint as a stroke survivor, as well as her memoir Hemispheres: inside a stroke as a point of departure for a study of stroke memoir. The link between illness narratives and narrative medicine, and their reciprocal aims of augmenting and humanising limited medical views of stroke, are considered. The paper argues that the crucial connection between coming to terms with a stroke, and finding terms for it, has implications for the voice, selfhood and power of those seeking these terms. The key argument is that stroke results in shifts of language for many survivors. The writers in question manifest a fragmentation in language which is superceded by narrative strategies which attempt to reassemble sense. An exploration of writing as a bulwark against deficits and a loss of order is therefore central to the piece. With the exception of Bauby, who does not survive, all the writers discussed in this article use narrative to document recovery. They do so employing language that is richer, more allegorical and more compelling than that of neuroscience. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers the significance of illness narratives (or ‘autopathographies’) by people living with life-threatening conditions. It explores the way that illness narratives draw on the structures of ancient myths – especially the quest myth – in order to confer meaning and purpose on suffering. In particular, it analyses selected narratives and body maps created as a form of therapy by a group of Xhosa- speaking HIV-positive women in South Africa, and traces the links between their representations and the quest myth. Understanding their experience of illness in terms of larger, pre-existing cultural scripts is shown to have therapeutic effects, helping the women to retain their identities and regain a sense of order, control and general well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are emerging links between reflection and humanistic, patient-centered practice. We created the Family Centered Experience (FCE) to help students understand the experience of illness from the patient's perspective. The FCE centers on students' reflections of their conversations with their volunteer patients and families - these conversations and reflections are at the core of small group activities. The FCE Interpretive Project provides students with a chance to reflect on their volunteer's illness experience. Students reflect on how the volunteer's experience has influenced the way they understand the unique experience of illness and its impact on individuals, families and friends. Projects have included poems, songs, collages, paintings, quilts, sculptures, books, slide presentations, and games. By carrying forward into clerkships what they have learned from their patients and in their discussions, students are better equipped to handle the challenges of the hidden curriculum and to preserve the values of humanistic medicine espoused in the FCE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explored whether previous experiences with human diabetes influenced how people perceived and responded to the onset of diabetes in a companion animal, and if the experience of diabetic pet care might influence people's thinking and actions in relation to human health. We conducted a series of semi-structured interviews with sixteen (16) pet owners who had treated dogs and cats for diabetes, along with semi-structured interviews with seven (7) health care professionals and an appraisal of documentary sources. We found that talking with pet owners about their experience of diabetic pet care brought to the surface poignant reflections on human health and health care. They did not strictly separate human health from what they had learned in the course of caring for a companion animal, in other words, even as they recognized and honored species differences. These findings suggest that the anthropological concept of illness prototypes is relevant for the field of anthrozoology. Indeed, illness prototypes that cross species boundaries may prove useful for health researchers, animal welfare organizations, veterinarians, and professionals who treat human patients or who aim to promote human health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study employs a phenomenological hermeneutic approach to analyse narratives written by mainland Chinese people who care for a family member with serious mental illness. Locating culture at the centre of the analysis, the study explicates and explores the salient themes and subthemes in texts that were originally published in a monthly psychoeducational newsletter. Analysis reveals that mental illness constitutes a catastrophic and disruptive event for the caregivers, for the most part women, and their families. Caregivers are driven by intersecting cultural and state-propagated discourses to exert heroic effort and commitment in order to ensure a full “recovery” for the ill family member. In light of the intense stigma surrounding mental illness in Chinese culture, the family member's condition is actively concealed by caregivers. This is to protect healthy family members as much as the ill person. The study concludes that cultural phenomena inform both the sense of disruption experienced by mainland Chinese family caregivers in mental illness and the sense of continuity in their fulfilling of socioculturally prescribed roles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information exchange and relational development, as well as health behaviour change via clinical counselling, occur in the medical interview. In the realm of more widespread health education efforts, the public can be educated about health issues through persuasive health campaigns. Within medical training, there are issues of learning both the art and science of medicine, understanding the basic science of disease as well as the individual patient's illness experience and its influence on health. Narrative is a key communication strategy and concept crucial in all of these interrelated issues, as human beings are all storytellers. Understanding patients' experiences in the clinical encounter and in clinical training through their stories, and communicating health information in a persuasive, easily understood manner in various settings may be accomplished through the use of narrative, as a clinical counselling strategy, an information-gathering technique, and a teaching tool. This paper will advance narrative in medicine by presenting various theories and extant work supporting its use in interpersonal and mass communication settings, highlighting background and theoretical support for its use as a message strategy as well as a communication and educational tool. In closing, practical ways to implement narrative in clinical contexts will be offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the epistemological and clinical foundations of insight into psychosis. After a brief introduction of its importance in psychiatry, we will explore the empirical data on 'lack of insight' in psychosis. To overcome the significant shortcomings of the prevailing view of insight, we are proposing to focus on the subjective dimension of insight and to conceptualize insight as a particular form of narrative production, which we call narrative insight. The narrative perspective emphasizes the subject, the process of insight formation and the importance of the audience, the intended effects and its pragmatic purposes. The narrative insight approach focuses not only on the content and the form of the narratives, but also on the temporal dimension and the potential specific phases of insight. We conclude by proposing specific topics for future research into the links between insight, clinical approaches to psychosis and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While it is increasingly recognized that contextually relevant HIV prevention and AIDS mitigation interventions are more likely to succeed than enforced generic strategies, relatively little attention has been given to understanding the manner in which affected individuals and communities themselves perceive and subsequently experience the epidemic. Drawing on research undertaken in the Caprivi region of Namibia, this article challenges dominant biomedical HIV/AIDS discourse and demonstrates the important role of alternativeillness narratives in shaping local understandings of and responses to HIV/AIDS. Four interlinked illness narratives are examined: the relationship between illness and resource use, gender and pollution, religious ideas about morality, and witchcraft accusations. Links are made between these narratives and threats to the social and moral order brought about by socioeconomic change. While treatment sought can initially be influenced by the illness narrative employed, an overriding concern to cure the ill person combined with a range of coexisting social pressures to be seen to be doing the “right thing” ultimately play a more significant role in determining treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the lens of an illness narrative, this article focuses on the complex relationships between biomedicine and alternative therapies in Brittany, France. Themes drawn from the illness narrative highlight Breton ideas about the body, the source of healers' legitimacy, and the authority of the biomedical system. I argue that in this region, both biomedical and religious authorities are perceived to be allied to non-local elites, and both are subject to antagonistic criticism. Nonetheless, resistance to biomedicine through recourse to alternative therapies is mixed with ongoing dependence on the biomedical system, since patients seek strategic combinations of both systems to maximize health and other benefits. Pursuing alternative therapies empowers patients by enabling them to negotiate treatment options and to choose among competing narrative constructions of illness. By highlighting parallels between the Breton material and published work based elsewhere in Europe and North America, I argue that this case study has useful implications for anthropologists and medical practitioners working in broader Western contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A primary role of medicine is often perceived as treating or alleviating pain, but what actually constitutes pain can be defined in many ways. A major impediment to a more adequate conceptualization of pain is thought to be the manner in which it has been ‘medicalized,’ over the course of the twentieth century resulting in the inevitable Cartesian split between body and mind. Consequently, the dominant conceptualization of pain has focused almost exclusively upon the neurophysiological aspects, both in diagnosis and treatment, with the subsequent inference that it can be rationally and objectively measured. Social science, in particular the sociological literature on chronic illness, offers a framework for understanding the experience of pain by focusing on ‘lived experience,’ including narratives of suffering. Medically, pain is often explained in terms of risk by attempting to measure so-called objective symptoms, whereas accounts of suffering may encompass more easily the notion of total pain (Saunders 1976), which includes psychological, spiritual, interpersonal and even financial aspects of chronic pain, as well as its physical aspects. This paper proposes that illness narratives and phenomenological accounts have become intrinsic to the understanding and treatment of pain and, using examples from empirical research, considers how pain narratives challenge biomedical approaches to chronic pain, which are inevitably framed in the discourse of risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study sought to analyse how knowledge of the controversial illness, known among other names as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) or Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), is rhetorically constructed in the accounts of four sufferers. A discursive psychological approach was adopted, to analyse how sufferers of CFS use their discourse to actively represent notions of blame and accountability and their stake and interest, in situated illness narratives. The themes identified all serve to construct CFS as a legitimate organic illness. By constructing CFS in this way, the sufferers are able to position themselves as legitimately ill, and thus avoid the stigma and threats to their identities that being diagnosed as suffering from a psychological disorder could bring. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]