Lecute 1 Flashcards
What is health
“ Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.”
Epidemiology
“ The study of the occurrence and distribution of health-related events, states or processes in specified populations, including the study of the determinants influencing such processes and the application of this knowledge to control relevant health problems”
1 Restitution Stories
Associated with the recently ill rather than
chronically ill, and are compelling because
they are often true
• If you are considering the metaphysical elements
of your illness (changes to yourself, your sense of
identity and purpose) this story line will NOT fit -
for when treatment doesn’t work this storyline
offers nothing to fall back upon
• The active character in this story is the
medication or the treatment modality.
Biomedicine emerges as heroic and triumphant
2 Chaos Stories
• As much as restitution stories are admired, chaos
stories are not
• The stories are from people who have no distance
from their illness in their life – instead they are
consumed by it
• They follow a characteristic story development of
‘and then…. and then…. and then’
• The story line is most difficult to bear for health
care workers who can offer little in the way of
palliation… it renders all treatments pointless
• Often compared to a whirlpool, these stories
belong to the sufferer and no-one else
• Often such patients cannot provide all of the
salient medical information about their
condition, as the self itself has become
broken and is no longer coherent
• Witnesses to these stories often try to
redirect them, to lead the teller onwards to
an uplifting narrative arc, but in a chaos story
the whirlpool effect is stronger
3 Quest Stories
• The story line provides a departure date, an initiation period and then a return – in this case rather like the stages of a journey
• The self is constructed heroically and the key characteristic of these stories is endurance and forbearance by the teller.
• The experience of suffering is central to the initial quest
experience but it is by learning the integrity of suffering that
the questing hero encounters their boon - the ‘reason’ for
their trials
Co nnections to your reading for today Hakanson & Ohlen (2016)
people living ‘rough’ or ‘homeless’
it is by telling stories that the people attempt to gain control
back over their lives and health
The 3 key stories they tell are all chaos stories and fall
into 3 timelines – falling ill (reliant only on oneself),
being ill (neglect and rejection by health carers) and
the future (dark where death is a release)
4 Testimonial Stories
• Another nice example of Frank’s storytelling comes from Gardener et al (2019) which explores how patients make youtube videos of themselves being treated for Parkinson Disease by Deep Brain Stimulation Therapy
• While the treatment is controversial in terms of its benefits and side effects, the patients themselves tend to brush over the complex effects of their dependency on a technical support team and uncertain outcomes to create their amateur videos along specific aesthetic lines with a message
that is technologically deterministic.
• The little clips are believable and emotionally engaging esp the off/on images of the stimulator on their body tremors.
• They are ‘testimonial’ stories – pressing you to witness and to believe and
excluding information that contradicts their key storyline.
