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Drawing on Frank’s illness narratives, the mother of a profoundly disabled son argues that Vanier and Nouwen’s descriptions of caregiving conform to the socially mandated quest narrative requiring ...

Developing solid communication-based partnerships through obtaining illness narratives allows for an understanding of patients’ social resources, values, and beliefs and allows an opportunity to provide person-centered care. This study aimed to elicit co-created illness narratives from persons of color who have serious illness. Twenty patients receiving care for serious illness were interviewed at a large academic medical center. The interviews focused on how illness affected patients’ lives, and were followed by formation of illness narratives. From the persons living with serious illness, three main themes emerged: 1) time, 2) life changes, and 3) family. Participants described how illness did influence their lifestyles and identities but did not define their personhood. Family influence had a lasting effect on participants’ values and beliefs, and family presence was viewed as valuable in their current lives. Narratives from persons of color with serious illness can provide an intimate account informing nurses’ understanding of patients’ illness experiences and may enhance communication between nurses and patients.

The purpose of the present study was to learn about the experiences of parents of children diagnosed with renal failure at different stages of the disease in order to get closer to the process they carry out as caregivers. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 parents and analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis method. Data analysis revealed two axes: spatial and temporal. The present article focuses on the temporal axis comprised of diagnosis, coping, and remission. These phases are discussed according to Frank’s illness narratives of chaos, quest, and restitution, representing stages in the sequence people undergo while coping with a disease. However, in the case of incurable diseases, such as end-stage renal disease, when there is no restitution and regression in the medical condition is followed by chaos, we suggest a new narrative structure, the Sisyphean Narrative, to symbolize the recurring nature of struggling with the disease.

Humans are inherent storytellers that in turn shapes our identity. The tendency to talk about health and illness is called ‘illness narratives.’ Most research on illness narratives is generated fro...

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 ...

This essay brings together critical perspectives from the discrete traditions of artists’ books and the medical humanities to examine artists’ books by three contemporary artists – Penny Alexander, Martha A. Hall and Amanda Watson-Will – that treat experiences of illness and wellbeing. Through its focus on a multimodal and multisensory art form that has allegiances with, but is not reduced to, narrative, the essay adds to recent calls to rethink key assumptions of illness narrative study and to challenge utilitarian approaches. In particular, it draws attention to the aesthetic and imaginative elements of illness communication by exploring how artists’ books represent lived experiences in a distinctively palpable way and offer an “intimate authority” that extends beyond narrative legitimacy or a form of struggle against the medical gaze. By interrogating narrative’s dominance in medical humanities research, the essay further expands awareness of illness experiences that resist conventional forms of representation (such as chronic illness), and of alternative reflective practices within healthcare education that encourage engagement with both mind and body.

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 hea...

In the last decades, narrative theory has collaborated with sociology and anthropology of health to account for the importance that illness narratives hold for those who are or have been sick, for ...

This essay begins with a metaphor describing who enters the field of humanities in medicine and healthcare and the types of work they do. The role of witness is discussed, underscoring tensions between witnessing and analyzing. The essay then turns to my own background as an example of how each professional in this field brings something distinct. I briefly describe the three basic principles of my work with narrative: the injunction to keep the stories in the foreground, the work of amplifying and connecting stories, and the need for generous interpretation. The second half of the essay tells three illness stories, describing their importance to me over several decades. These stories are by Audre Lorde, Reynolds Price, and Stewart Alsop, dealing with problems of silences imposed on ill people, problems caused by physicians' perceived lack of time, and dilemmas of the end of life, respectively.

Illness stories are a prime analytical way of understanding patient perspectives on cancer. Nevertheless, limited studies have focused on stories of endometrial cancer. An ethnographic study including participant observation and interviews among 18 Danish women with endometrial cancer was conducted to examine prevalent stories and the ways the women responded to them. In this article, the analysis focuses on two exemplary cases, which present a line of issues related to the kinds of experiences that suffering includes. Findings illustrate that feelings of luck were central to the experience of being diagnosed, treated and cured, which was related to the way health professionals framed endometrial cancer as favourable through notions of curable/incurable, trivial and gentle/invasive and brutal, and aggressive/non-aggressive. Drawing upon the concept of a ‘hierarchy of suffering’, we exemplify how women tended to scale own experiences of suffering against others’, leading some to believe they were not in a legitimate position to draw attention to themselves nor seek help and support, despite adverse physical, psychosocial effects. Thus, feelings of being lucky were intertwined with a sense of ambivalence. We conclude by discussing how suffering arises within a moral context, suggesting that the ways we speak of cancer may make some experiences unspeakable. This calls for increased clinical attention to more diverse narratives of cancer.

Illness narratives are uncommon in Arabic fiction. Literary Disability Studies considers how disability operates in a text. This paper examines the lack of illness narratives in Arabic fiction and traces the sociological reasons behind this absence. A close-reading of an Arabic novel examining Multiple Sclerosis is presented. The novel (Āyām Jamīlah, (Beautiful Days) by Palestinian-Jordanian author Reema Humood) presents Multiple Sclerosis as a complex narrative of both illness and societal discrimination. An interview with the author is used for supplementary analyses.

Capoeira, the African-Brazilian dance and martial art has enthusiastic devotees in Britain. Most practitioners are acutely aware of their capoeira embodiment, and have strategies to protect themselves from injury, and ways to seek treatment for any injuries they get. Drawing on data from a long-term ethnography and a set of 32 open-ended interviews with advanced students, the paper explores student strategies to prevent capoeira injuries, and their discoveries of effective remedies to recover from them, before it presents an analysis of their injury narratives using Frank's three-fold typology of illness narratives. The capoeira study therefore adds to the research on sports and dance injuries, and to the intellectual debates on the nature of narrative in research on illness and injury as well as exploring one aspect of the culture of capoeira students in the UK.

Up to this point, I have presented the meanings and experiences of the HIV epidemic in secretive public narratives. In this chapter I shift the focus to explore individual experiences of AIDS, through the lens of a biographical account of a young couple. I view their life, and the end of their lives, in terms of the concept of hope. Located at the turning point of the HIV epidemic, when ART was slowly becoming available in Bushbuckridge, I trace their quest for healing, care and support. While driven by the hope for an end to suffering, their accounts of interactions with health professionals and family, highlights their despair and hopelessness.

Objective The present study aims to explore post-traumatic growth in cancer patients comparing the active phase, when patients undergo different treatments, and the remission phase, characterised by periodic follow-ups and gradually return to lives outside the hospital world. Methods 69 cancer patients (36 in active phase and 33 in remission phase) completed an online survey narrating their growth experience related to cancer disease. A modelling emergent theme analysis was implemented for narratives of both group by means of T-Lab software. Results Four themes emerged for narratives of active phase group: 'the time of illness and the time of life (saturating the 46% of words)', 'the meaning-seeking' (21%), 'to find oneself in a battle (21%)' and 'to learn by battling' (12%). Remission phase group themes concerned 'the time of life' (40%), 'the seismic experience' (31%), 'to care for the Self and for others' (15%) and 'strength from vulnerability' (14%). Conclusions Remission group narratives are close to PTG as defined in scientific literature, while patients in the active phase of disease narrated PTG as the attempt of including illness in their life trajectory and learning from the battle against cancer. Author suggests the definition of peritraumatic growth as a transformation process parallel to treatment phase.

Heini Hakosalo makes use of an extensive collection of written, unpublished tuberculosis-related illness narratives to analyze the experience of tuberculosis and tuberculosis sanatoria “from below” within the context of twentieth-century Finland. Hakosalo argues that by linking their personal illness histories to national history, the authors could give a sense of purpose and meaning to their personal losses and suffering. At the same time, their testimonies stood as a contribution, however modest, to the national knowledge-community. She distinguishes three narrative strands that allowed the authors to assimilate their personal illness with the collective ills of the nation: histories of tuberculosis as stories of progress, stories of war, and stories of belonging.

In this article, we examine illness narratives to illuminate the discursive work that patients undertake to construct themselves as “good” and adherent. Biographical narrative interviews were undertaken with 17 patients receiving anticoagulation for stroke prevention in atrial fibrillation, from five English hospitals (May 2016–June 2017). Through pluralistic narrative analysis, we highlight the discursive tensions narrators face when sharing accounts of their medicine-taking. They undertake challenging linguistic and performative work to reconcile apparently paradoxical positions. We show how the adherent patient is co-constructed through dialogue at the intersection of discourses including authority of doctors, personal responsibility for health, scarcity of resources, and deservingness. We conclude that the notion of medication adherence places a hidden moral and discursive burden of treatment on patients which they must negotiate when invited into conversations about their medications. This discursive work reveals, constitutes, and upholds medicine-taking as a profoundly moral practice.

Writing (prosaic, non-fictional and (auto)biographical) and photography (as aesthetics and technology, language, material object and practice) can communicate and interrelate in the narration and depiction of physical disorders. The five articles in this Special Issue explore how the body and its pain and disorders can be accessed in projects that either interlace words and images within themselves or that communicate and interrelate with other written or visual texts produced by others. In these photo-textual encounters (or clashes), wounded, tormented, weakened bodies are narrated and mediated, as well as marked, modified and exposed by personal and emotional choices or by ideological and socio-historical circumstances. The articles invite us to reflect on the ideological discourses, issues of power, practice, ethics and agency that any illness implicates, as well as the flexible boundaries of the written and visual language narrating such an overpowering experience.

The number of workers with a chronic disease is steadily growing in industrialized countries. To cope with and to give meaning to their illness, patients construct illness narratives, which are widely shared across patient societies, personal networks and the media. This study investigates the influence of these shared illness narratives on patient’s working lives, by examining the impact of reading a positive work story versus negative work story on patients’ sustainable employability. We expected that this relationship would be mediated by positive emotions and the extent to which the story enhanced awareness of desires future selves, and moderated by identification with story character. An online field experiment with 166 people with Inflammatory Bowel Disease in The Netherlands showed that while reading a positive story of a patient with the same condition significantly increased positive emotions, these emotions did not influence sustainable employability. However, reading a positive story was related to higher sustainable employability when patients became more aware of their desired possible future work selves. Finally, identification with the story character moderated the impact of story type on sustainable employability. This study showed that personal engagement with a positive work story of a fellow patient is related to higher sustainable employability. Findings can be helpful for health professionals to empower employees with a chronic disease.

This study is focused on the pneumoconiosis workers’ illness narratives in Bashan Town in Chongqing. In-depth interviews were used to gather their illness narratives, and a “counterstory” framework...

Dominant breast cancer narratives equate early detection and screening with “cure,” advocate for “awareness,” and identify women who undergo treatment for early stage disease as “survivors.” Left out of these narratives are the “metavivors”: women and men diagnosed with “incurable” metastatic breast cancer, also known as Stage IV. This article uses case studies to profile four women living with metastatic breast cancer who turn to social media to tell their stories: Sally, a former civil rights attorney turned breast cancer activist, who uses social media platforms to organize and mobilize Stage IV patients to advocate on their own behalf; Jane, who plows through databases of dense medical research to find treatments to save her own life; Jenny, a young mother dying of metastatic breast cancer who shares her experiences on a YouTube channel; and Grace, who participates in an early-stage clinical trial that she believes “cured” her, a term eschewed by both the medical establishment and fellow metavivors.

Illness narratives are stories that focus on, or are inspired by, the sometimes life-altering experience of illness. Most narrative constructions of these illness experiences are built upon one of three broad narrative “skeletons.” One skeletal subform, the romantic/warrior narrative, is critiqued by comedian Norm Macdonald in a humorous anecdote that mocks the expectation that cancer patients must wage an epic and heroic battle against their pernicious cancer to have a chance to survive. Macdonald explicates that such a mentality produces heroes and villains, winners and losers, and places additional burden on cancer patients. In this analysis, I argue that Macdonald’s effective use of humor and fulfillment of the five functions of health-related narration enable his story to gain narrative rationality and serve as effective rhetorical tools in encouraging the audience to accept the narrator’s critique of the romantic/warrior subform.

The aim of this article was to explore identity struggles related to the experience of living with medically unexplained symptoms (MUS) in illness narratives of patients with MUS. These patients pose therapeutic and communication challenges as their symptoms do not have an obvious underlying diagnosis. Previous studies have shown that their stories can best be described as ‘chaos narratives’, lacking a chronological development of symptoms or ‘legitimacy narratives’, through which patients seek to legitimize their invisible symptoms. The study draws on 21 interviews with MUS patients. The examples were selected from two contrasting cases in order to show how the patients accomplish their identity struggles through distinctive discursive tools, such as metaphors, modality, personal pronouns, evaluative devices, as well as characteristic interactional structure, navigating around the three identity dilemmas: continuity and change, self and other, and agent or undergoer.

This article argues that anti-vaccinationists pose an ethical challenge to researchers. On the one hand, research practices in narrative medicine push us to empower illness narratives. On the other...

Research on both cancer survivorship and support needs has been limited in its attention to survivors from culturally-diverse communities. This study examined the perspectives of members and leaders of ethnically-identified breast cancer support groups regarding the meanings and expectations attached to survivorship. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 38 African American and Latina survivors in Central Florida. Participant narratives invoked themes of spiritual renewal and deepening religious faith, and deemphasized individual responsibility for personal change. Participants emphasized the importance of shared cultural identity in shaping the survivor experience, and some Latina women drew parallels between survivorship and the challenges of migration to a new country. An unwavering display of optimism was held to be paramount. These themes are interpreted within the framework of the interplay between dominant societal discourses of survivorship and locally-constructed meanings. Findings underscore the importance for healthcare providers to be cognizant and respectful of diverse perspectives on illness.

Drawing on coursework associated with listening strategies in health communication, students will be guided through a process of reflection, contemplation and articulation as they map their health ...

This essay examines a challenge to common literary representations of female mental illness in the Early Modern period-the hysterical woman-in a collection of French short stories contemporary to Vesalius's De Fabrica: Jeanne Flore's Tales and Trials of Love (1542). Jeanne Flore's tales depict several mentally disturbed female protagonists, young women prone to paroxysms of madness and self-mutilation. This study maintains that while Tales and Trials of Love superficially participates in the literary tradition that grew out of those accepted social and medical beliefs, it also questions the long-accepted paradigm of female hysteria and points to a shift in the socio-medical climate. Jeanne Flore's fictional narratives suggest that mental illness no longer consists in the realignment of a uterine imbalance, but rather in the telling of personal stories, a precursor to psychoanalysis and narrative medicine.

Illness narratives, including video narratives, created by young people allow expressiion of one’s story about their struggles. It has been shown that creating these narratives can improve health outcomes and overall quality of life. This article provides a theoretical background as to why adolescent and young adult (AYA) cancer patients may benefit from creating video illness narratives and presents an exemplary case of this approach with a young man receiving treatment for T-Cell Leukemia. Thematic aspects of his narrative are identified and explored. Qualitative information about his experience filming as well as his responses to a questionnaire regarding the impact of making his video narrative with respect to his emotional health, medical plans, relationships with others (including medical providers) are also reported.

This article explores the relationship between discourse and experiences of ill health. Drawing on narratives, it shows how a mother who is experiencing difficulties with breastfeeding embodies sentiments of shame over what she perceives as a failure to perform motherhood. The notions of interdiscursivity and the historical body are employed to ground the individual's experience in discursive practices, and to propose that shame is a sentiment that arises in deviations from the biopolitical ideologies that are produced and reproduced through those practices. Expressing shame becomes a resource for assuming responsibility for failed motherhood; and, at the same time, it appears to obstruct recovery to smoothly functioning breastfeeding.

Physicians' narratives of their own experiences of illness can be a kind of empathic bridge across the divide between a professional healer and a sick patient. This essay considers ways in which physicians' narratives of their own and family members' experiences of cancer shape encounters with patients and patients' experiences of illness. It analyzes ethical dimensions of physicians' narratives (such as those by Atul Gawande, Siddhartha Mukherjee, and Paul Kalanithi) and of reflective writing in medical education. It also compares illness narratives written by physicians-turned-patients to those written by patients without medical training in order to explore questions of who ultimately benefits from these narratives and whether these narratives can engender greater empathy between clinicians and patients.

Patients’ stories of their illnesses help bridge the divide between patients and providers, facilitating more humane medical care. Illness narratives have been classified into three types: restitution (expectation of recovery), chaos (suffering and loss), and quest (unexpected positive effect from illness). Undiagnosed patients have unique illness experiences and obtaining their narratives would provide insights into the medical and emotional impact of living with an undiagnosed illness. Adults and children with undiagnosed diseases apply to be evaluated by the Undiagnosed Diseases Network (UDN). Written illness narratives from 40 UDN applicants, including 20 adult probands who applied for themselves and 20 parents who applied for their children, were analyzed for: 1) narrative content and 2) narrative type. Narrative content: could be grouped into three themes: 1) Expectations of the UDN: the majority felt they had no further healthcare options and hoped the UDN would provide them with a diagnosis, with the adults expecting to return to their previously healthy life and the parents wanting information to manage their child’s healthcare. 2) Personal medical information: the narratives reported worsening of symptoms and some offered opinions regarding the cause of their illness. The proband narratives had few objective findings, while parental narratives had detailed objective information. 3) Experiences related to living with their undiagnosed illness: frustration at being undiagnosed was expressed. The adults felt they had to provide validation of their symptoms to providers, given the lack of objective findings. The parents worried that something relevant to their child’s management was being overlooked. Narrative type: All the narratives were of the chaos type, but for different reasons, with the probands describing loss and suffering and the parents expressing fear for their child’s future. The parental narratives also had elements of restitution and quest, with acceptance of “a new normal”, and an emphasis on the positive aspects of their child’s illness which was absent from the probands. These narratives illustrate the chaos that coexists with being undiagnosed. The differences between the proband and parental narratives suggest that these two groups have different needs that need to be considered during their evaluation and management.

We interweave arts-based inquiry, painting, and autoethnography, to critically examine one researcher's fearful narratives around cancer, death, dying, and family myths. These methods give us the distance to deconstruct Christine's past schema in order to take away its powerful influence on her life. This destabilized illness narrative leads to a transformational narrative of peace. Arts-based inquiry invites the viewer/reader to engage in similar acts of deconstruction and transformation.

Meaning-making has been shown to be a core process for patients adjusting to a chronic illness, and narratives have become an important lens through which to study how individuals make meaning, or make sense, of illness. These narratives give voice to the lived experience of chronic illness and its many effects on health and vitality, daily life, and sense of self. This chapter reviews the research on meaning-making processes in the context of inflammatory bowel disease. It first examines the disruptive effects of chronic illness, focusing on biographical disruption, loss of self, and temporal dimensions of meaning. Then, it turns to the reconstruction of meaning through illness narratives, exploring both individual and social processes. The study of meaning-making through illness narratives has many potential benefits to health care initiatives as well as to patients themselves.

Background and aims. In pediatrics receiving a diagnosis of a chronic condition is a matter that involves caregivers at first. Beyond the basic issues of caring for the physical body of the ill child, caregivers’ manners of facing and making sense of the disease orient and co-construct their children’s sensemaking processes of the disease itself. The aim of this article is to explore the experience of a rare chronic illness, Hereditary Angioedema (HAE), in pediatrics, from the caregivers’ perspective. Hereditary Angioedema is characterized by subcutaneous swellings that can involve the mucosal tissues of external as well as internal parts of the body, manifesting in a highly variable and unpredictable way in terms of localization, severity, and frequency. Materials and methods. Within a qualitatively-driven research design, we conducted a qualitative narrative semiotic analysis of n.28 mothers’ narratives on their children’s disease experience. Narratives were collected by an ad hoc interview on three domains of the disease experience: A. interpretation of the disease variability; B. dialogical processes; C. management of the disease. Subsequently, we executed a TwoStep cluster analysis for categorical data to detect cross-sectional profiles of the maternal sensemaking processes of the disease. Results. The coding grid was built analyzing the characteristic of the narrative links that orient the connection between the elements of the experience within each domain: A. the connection among events, for the domain of the interpretation of the disease variability; B. the connection between self and other, for the domain of the dialogue; C. the connection among sensemaking and actions, for the domain of the management of the disease. Results from cluster analysis show three narrative profiles: 1. adempitive; 2. reactive; 3. dynamic. Discussion. Profiles will be discussed in the light of the general conceptual framework of the Sense of Grip on the Disease (SoGoD) highlighting the importance of those sensemaking processes which, instead of relying on a coherent and close interpretation of the disease, are characterized by a degree of tolerance for the uncertainty and the unknowingly.

Background: Illness narratives with meaningful, competent and targeted content have been shown to provide useful guides for patient decision-making and have positive influences on health behaviors. The use of narratives in decision aids can confer a sense of structure, plot and context to illness experiences and help patients make treatment decisions that feel sensible, informed, and transparent. Aim: This paper presents narratives of suffering and healing from patients and their caregivers with advanced heart failure who engaged in decision-making regarding Left Ventricular Device Assist (LVAD) treatment. Methods: Narratives were collected from in-depth interviews with patients who accepted (n = 15) versus declined (n = 15) LVAD implant, LVAD candidates who had received education about LVAD and were in the process of making a decision (n = 15), and caregivers (family or significant others) of LVAD patients (n = 15). Results: Participants shared &ldquo, restitution&rdquo, narratives that most commonly conveyed a shift from pre-implant physical suffering and &ldquo, daily hell,&rdquo, fatigue so intense it &ldquo, hurts,&rdquo, along with emotional suffering from inability to engage with the world, to post-implant improvements in mobility and quality of life, including positivity and family support, adaptation on a &ldquo, journey,&rdquo, &ldquo, getting one&rsquo, s life back&rdquo, and becoming &ldquo, normal&rdquo, again. Conclusion: For LVAD patients, other patients&rsquo, illness narratives can help to give meaning to their own illness and treatment experiences and to more accurately forecast treatment impacts on lifestyle and identity. For clinicians, patient narratives can enhance patient&ndash, practitioner communication and understanding by highlighting perspectives and values that structure patients&rsquo, clinical experiences.

This article addresses the growing trend of crowdfunding for unproven stem cell-based treatments. Our analysis uses quantitative and qualitative data collected from two popular fundraising sites to examine how these sites are used to fund purported stem cell 'treatments' or 'therapies'. In addition to mapping the use and success of these online campaigns by people with different health conditions in different locations, we consider the breakthrough restitution story as a key narrative that campaign organisers use to solicit donations. We argue that crowdfunding is a rapidly growing digital space where 'truths' about experimental treatments are constituted and a politics of evidence is unfolding. These developments are to the potential financial benefit of crowdfunding platforms and businesses offering unproven stem cell-based interventions, and to the potential detriment of patients and their supporters.

This paper analyses the COVID-19 narratives of US President Donald Trump and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, combining principles from applied linguistic approaches to illness narratives and sociolinguistic approaches to language and gender. It focuses specifically on the ways Johnson and Trump structured their stories to portray themselves as certain kinds of ‘characters’, the ways they discursively constructed agency in their narratives, and the ways they engaged in various practices of stance-taking. The analysis reveals that, although Johnson and Trump seemed to have taken very different lessons from their illnesses, the subtext of both their narratives promoted a masculinist discourse designed to depict them as ‘strong leaders’ and to detract attention from discussions of their reckless personal behaviour leading up to their infections and the failures of their governments to formulate coherent plans to control the pandemic. Keywords: affect, agency, illness narratives, masculinity, stance

We examined whether narratives related to mental health and pain in 120 women with endometriosis. Participants wrote narratives about endometriosis, rated the narratives on centrality to identity and positive and negative self-change, and completed measures of depressive symptoms, life-satisfaction, pain intensity and pain symptoms. Narratives were content-coded for themes of agency and communion. Higher centrality to identity, more negative self-change, and lower agency and communion were related to poorer mental health. Higher centrality to identity was associated with more pain symptoms. Narrative measures predicted mental health beyond pain intensity, pain symptoms, and neuroticism. The results indicate that how women with endometriosis narrate their illness is connected to mental health.

In the field of chronic and serious illness, meaning-making with regards to the illness experience has been shown to be a core process for patients. This study focuses on women's narratives of their experiences of living with breast cancer. Within the framework of narrative psychology, illness narratives are considered to provide the main means through which patients make sense of their illness experience and construct its place in their life story. In this paper, we present findings from a narrative study that aimed to explore the different meanings that breast cancer holds for Greek women. In the broader study, four basic narrative types about breast cancer emerged from the analysis. In this paper, we focus on one of these narrative types, in which illness is constructed as an entrance into a state of liminality and where the women's sense of self seems to be “suspended”. The core features of this narrative type are described and arguments are developed regarding its usefulness. We argue that this is a narrative type that deserves further attention, particularly as it seems to reflect a socially non-preferred storyline, which might result in these women's stories being sidestepped or silenced. The implications of this narrative type for healthcare and counselling in cancer care are discussed.

The authors analyzed messages from an online support group for parents of children with Persistent Hyperplastic Primary Vitreous. This eye disorder, while not life-threatening, affects children’s eyesight and can impinge on the lives of parents and caretakers. The literature review examines Frank’s typology of illness narratives, prompting the question of whether Frank’s work is applicable to the narrative accounts of people who do not experience illness firsthand. Analysis of support group discourse not only confirms prior studies of illness narratives but also suggests that current typologies do not fully address the accounts of those who witness and are affected by the illness of another.

In recent decades studies based on questionnaires and interviews have concluded that when doctors become ill they face significant barriers to seeking help. Several reasons have been proposed, primarily the notion that doctors' work environment predisposes them to an inappropriate help-seeking behaviour. In this article, the idea of the ill physician as a paradox in a medical drama is examined. Through a text-interpretive and comparative approach to historical illness narratives written by doctors suffering from one specific diagnosis, namely opioid addiction, the complex set of considerations guiding their behaviour as patients are to some extent revealed. The article concludes that, in the identity transition necessary to become a patient, doctors are held back by their professional status and that every step to assist them needs to take shape based on an awareness of the underlying principles of the medical drama. Written illness narratives by doctors, such as those highlighted in this article, might serve as a tool to increase such awareness.