Sociological Approaches To Chronic Illness Flashcards
What are features of the onset of symptoms at the beginning of a chronic illness?
Symptoms can be striking
However more often slow in their onset
Other explanations for the symptoms are often available
What is the impact on someone’s life that being diagnosed with a long-term condition can have?
Often a period of uncertainty
Ambivalent status of some diagnoses eg IBS or chronic fatigue syndrome
Process can be quite unpleasant eg the investigations
Diagnosis can be shocking, threatening, a relief
What are illness narratives?
The story-telling and accounting practices that occur in the face of illness
Offer a way of making sense of the illness and can perform certain functions
A lot of sociological research on chronic illness is based on people’s narratives.
What is biographic disruption?
Identifies chronic illness as a major disruptive experience
- can involve grief of pre-illness life
- can encompass disruption of future plans
What is narrative reconstruction?
Process by which the shattered self is reconstructed in ways that explain the appearance of illness.
Comes from a desire to create a sense of coherence, stability and order in the aftermath of biographical disruption.
What is everyday life work?
Managing daily living
Trying to keep pre-illness lifestyle and identity in tact eg disguising/minimising symptoms
Re-designate new life as normal life
What are the different types of ‘works’ of chronic illness?
Illness work - symptom management
Everyday life work - manage activities of daily living
Emotional work - managing one’s own emotions and those of others
Biographical work - reconstruction of biography in face of biographical disruption
Identity work - work to maintain an acceptable identity - how they and others see them
What emotional work is there with a LTC?
Managing one’s own emotions and those of others
-the work that patients do to protect the emotional well-being of others eg downplaying pain or other symptoms
Impacts on social relationships
The impact on role may be devastating eg mother, breadwinner - especially if it involves a switch to dependency
Define stigma?
A negatively defined condition, attribute, trait or behaviour conferring ‘deviant’ status; a spoiled identity
Define discredited stigma
Physically visible characteristic which sets the patient apart
The patient is discredited, thus affects not only the patient’s behaviour but the behaviour of others
What is discreditable stigma?
Nothing seen, but can be found out
Ie stigma not yet to be revealed so can be kept secret, revealed intentionally or by a factor the patient cannot control
Give an example of a condition associated with discreditable stigma
HIV, mental illness
Give an example of a condition associated with discredited stigma
Physical disability
Known suicide attempt
Give an example of a condition with both types of stigma
Epilepsy
Define enacted stigma
The real experience of prejudice, discrimination and disadvantage
Discrimination has actually occured
