Module: Health, Illness and Society

Topic 4


Topic 4: The Illness Experience

Objectives

When you have completed the reading and participated in the taught components for this week, we hope you will be able to:

  • Review different theoretical conceptualisations of illness experience
  • Describe how patients’ experiences of illness can be understood in terms of narrative, and identify how insights from narrative health research can be used to enhance health care

Lecture: Theoretical perspectives on illness experience

This lecture will describe and discuss narratives about experiences of illness and different approaches to narrative research.  

Seminar: Narrative health research

Click below to discuss:


Preparation for this week

For this seminar you will be required to read the Charmaz paper below and identify some key issues she identifies regarding experience of chronic illness.  Go to the rheumatoid arthritis (RA) section of the Healthtalkonline website (see link below) and look at some video clips on ‘impact of the diagnosis’.  Write 200 words linking the issues described by Charmaz with the experiences described by people with RA in the clips.

Set reading for this week

BOOK CHAPTERS

Rier DA: The patient's experience of illness. In: Handbook of Medical Sociology, 6th edn. Edited by Bird CE, Conrad P, Fremont AM, Timmermans S. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press; 2010. (Buy it or check library availability)

ACADEMIC PAPERS

Charmaz K: Loss of self: a fundamental form of suffering in the chronically ill. Sociology of Health and Illness 1983, 5: 168-195. (Read it here)

Hyden L-C: Illness and narrative. Sociology of Health and Illness 1997, 19: 48-69. (Read it here)

 

ELECTRONIC RESOURCE

Healthtalkonline section on people’s experiences of rheumatoid arthritis.    http://www.healthtalkonline.org/Bones_joints/Rheumatoid_Arthritis  

 

Lecture Notes and Powerpoints