Charmaz examines the loss of self that the chronically ill experience and how this happens. She discusses four main ways in which this happens: from restricted lives, social isolation, discrediting definitions of self and becoming a burden.
The main issue I found in the RA videos is that a lot of people had their own preconceived ideas of what RA is and what it means – the majority of the younger patients thought it was “something grannies got”, and that those with it would ‘end up in a wheelchair’. This obviously affects their reactions when they are diagnosed. As Saadia has said, Charmaz discusses patients viewing the losses that other people suffer, such as the effects of medications on other patients. In one of the videos, a patient discusses how alarmed she was to see how steroids had changed a friend and how relieved she was when she saw her once she had been diagnosed and she was back to her old self.
Charmaz talks about the restricted life in which the individual becomes aware that they cannot do the things they used to; one of the men interviewed said he began to realise, after years of diagnosis, that RA would affect many different parts of his life. Charmaz says that this can lead to a feeling of loss of control which may encourage individuals to voluntarily restrict their own lives which will then contribute to a loss of self.
