The Stories We Tell - Lecture 2

Question 1

Describe Restitution stories

Answer 1

• Associated with the recently ill rather than the chronically ill, and are compelling because they are often true
• Plot line: “yesterday I was health, today I am sick, but tomorrow I will be well again”
• These are the stories we ‘ought’ to tell about our illnesses.
• They have a line of action that is very clear (the steps to take to recover)
• The active character in this story is the medication or the treatment modality. Biomedicine emerges as heroic and triumphant.

Question 2

Describe Chaos stories

Answer 2

• Chaos stories are not admired, they are from people who have no distance from their illness - they are consumed by it.
• They follow the characteristic story development of “and then… and then… and then…”
• We have the moral duty to honour these stories (if we an bear it) by listening when they are recounted
• This type of storyline generally rendered all treatments useless, it is like a whirlpool, these stories belong to the sufferer and no one else.
• Listeners of the story often try to uplift the teller to a more positive storyline arc, but in the end the whirlpool is stronger.

Question 3

Describe quest stories

Answer 3

• This story line provides a departure date, an initiation period and then return
• The self is constructed heroically and the key charactaristic of these stories is forbearance and endurance 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
• They make sense of their suffering and then help other people

Question 4

Describe testimonial stories

Answer 4

• These are stories that are published as YouTube clips of the sufferer talking about their experience
• While the treatment is controversial in terms of its benefits and side effects, the patients themselves tend to brush over their dependency on a technical support team and uncertain outcomes to create their ammeter videos along specific aesthetic lines with a message that is technologically deterministic.
• This type of story presses you to witness and to believe, excluding information that contradicts their key storyline
• They don’t tell you all the facts, just the good things to try and persuade you that it works

Question 5

What are the names and characteristics of the stories in Olsen et al, reading?

Answer 5

Happiness, resistance and choice.
- Happiness: draws on smoking as a crutch and solace, as a way to decrease anxiety which allows them to succeed at being responsible for ‘being happy’
- Resistance: draws on the biomedical understanding of smoking being addictive (not my fault), also not wanting to do what people are telling them to do
- Choice: draws on choosing a lower frequency of smoking, use of nicotine patched, exercising agency and being victimised