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S/A 4071: Social/Cultural Aspects of Health and Illness:
Class 15: The Lived Experience of Being Ill 2:
* Research on experiencing chronic illness emphasizes:
- how people come to view themselves as chronically ill
- how illness affects their lives
- the patients’ perspectives rather than practitioners
* Social scientific studies of illness took off 40 years ago when
ethnographers found structural theories failed to account for how people
lived with/made sense of chronic conditions (e.g. Parsons’ “sick role”).
* Research moved toward inductive, subjective analysis (e.g. of patient’s
actively negotiating their roles, careers, managing stigma, selves &
identities) Becoming & Being Ill:
* Prior beliefs about health & illness vary by culture & group. These
inform our bodily experiences, often in an ideological way linking
institutional practices to the individual (i.e. how to handle illness)
Example: handling leprosy by Ethiopians vs. Americans.
* Medical practitioners beliefs/definitions of illness affects
individual/collective life: (1) masks social roots; (2) marginalizes
sufferers (e.g. Gulf War syndrome); & (3) creates personal, economic, &
social consequences (e.g. identity losses, stigmatization)
* Individual accounts of health & illness reflect identity & reality claims
for specific audiences & purposes (e.g. more detailed private vs. public
accounts when wary of consequences of being branded “ill”)
* Individual accounts also draw upon cultural values & individual
