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While web logs often are taken to be “Internet diaries,” unlike diaries that are private and serve only the needs of their authors, public blogs serve as a technological tool, allowing for the formation of Internet communities and challenges to institutional and/or cultural narratives.

I analyzed narratives constructed in two years of blog posts for each of five individuals with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). I sought to understand the relationship between personal stories of contested illness and broader illness narratives.

My findings suggest these personal illness stories operate within the artificial confines of the dominant models of a given society. Blogs are used not only as a chronicle of day-to-day happenings, but as a means of engaging with traditional illness narratives, challenging cultural narratives about CFS, and of resisting institutional narratives concerning the illness process.

This study brings voices of people with contested illnesses into the discourse on disability, where their perspectives have historically been poorly represented. The study also suggests that blogs can become sites of resistance and social change by providing a space in which counternarratives can be constructed and circulated.

There has been extensive growth in the employment of mental health peer support workers (PSWs) over the last decade. However, limited research exists when exploring how PSWs make sense of the transition of entering and enacting the role. The purpose of this paper is to explore the lived experience of NHS employed PSWs’ transition from their own experiences of mental health problems to provide a service to support individuals with their mental health problems.

The study used purposive sampling to recruit seven participants who were individually interviewed using a semi-structured interview schedule. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA).

Three superordinate themes were identified: fluctuating identities, PSW role and organisational culture. These were interpreted as interdependent with interrelating subordinate themes.

Participants considered the complex, idiosyncratic and changeable nature of the transitions and the impact on their individual, interpersonal and collective identities. Emotional and practical support appeared to assist the transition whilst competing roles and blurred boundaries constrained the enactment of the new role. Implications for practice and research are provided.

Reports on original research and adds to the sparse UK literature in this area.

The biomedical paradigm enjoys growing importance in our society. Biomedicine (e.g., Genetics) seems to occupy the position once held by religion and politics. In this context, every trivial problem of daily life is thought to require an appropriate remedy, and perfect health becomes a paramount value, especially within the upper class.

Medicalization is not only promoted by doctors. Today, other engines of medicalization are also available. These include pharmaceutical companies through marketing, advertising, and disease mongering; active consumers who seek a pharmacological solution – a magic bullet – to solve non-organic problems; technology, because highly sensitive diagnostic tools can now detect potential abnormalities even in very low quantities; and the culture of risk, which is connected to the evolution of diagnostic tools, because it is now always possible to be at risk of something.

The parts of life today considered pathological or quasi-pathological are ever increasing shyness, sadness, imperfect blood pressure, or glucose levels. Progressing editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) – the text from which diagnoses of mental illnesses are made – reveal a growing number of syndromes. These “diseases” are diagnosed on the grounds of certain symptoms and the number of weeks they last (quantification). Smartphones, with their tremendous capacity for data collection, contribute to a growth in self-diagnoses. For example, invited to log our every moment of sadness through a “trustworthy” avatar from our app (gamification), we can easily make too much of normal moments of discomfort, immediately seeing them – with a simple computation – transformed into something pathological in need of a cure.

Presents extracts from the stories of mid‐career women who have unseen chronic illness, exemplifying numerous gender and work‐related issues. Uses Heideggerian phenomenology to understand the experience of being a woman with an unseen illness, who also works full time. Eight women were interviewed. These women were seen to reside “in‐between” wellness and sickness, junior and senior organisational roles, and home and work responsibilities. They shared some of the difficulties they have faced. First, were problems influenced by the medical community as associated with getting a diagnosis. Given their full‐time career responsibilities, this was interpreted as being problematic. There were also related problems reported about colleagues assuming, because of their healthful appearance, that nothing was the matter and acting accordingly. The “woman’s role”, as experienced by sick women who also worked full time, added to their struggle to continue careers, care for others and attempt to attend to their own health. Illness, especially invisible illness, is rarely examined through the combined lens of workplace and gender.

In advancing the academic discourse around the theory of field, place and space in ethnographic research, this paper proposes a carnal sociological reading of the meaning and form of the Lindsay Leg Clubs – third-sector community leg care centres for older adults with leg problems – as a therapeutic space-construct.

The paper draws on non-formulaic, polymorphic ethnographic research in the UK Lindsay Leg Clubs conducted through multiple on-site and extramural engagements with the Leg Club community between 2019 and 2023 and an interview with the Leg Club founder and president, Professor Ellie Lindsay OBE. Wacquant's (2015) reflexive, enactive ethnographic approach is applied to develop an intellectual and carnal know-how of Leg Clubs as therapeutic space-constructs.

The researcher's “flesh and blood” experience of the Leg Clubs reveals the importance of cognitive and embodied appreciation of sounds, smells, sights, movements, the structures of wound stigma, centre-stage physical bodies of members and the volunteers, the material arrangement of the place and the researcher's own visceral and intellectual, biographical relation to the fieldwork to understand the therapeutic form and meaning of Leg Club spaces.

Applying the carnal sociology approach to reveal the therapeutic form and meaning of the Leg Club spaces makes concrete the abstract distinctions between field, place and space in ethnographic research, hence advancing the discourse around the theory of field in ethnography. A carnal sociological reading of the Leg Club spaces has implications for an embodied understanding of broader community care spaces.

We are currently experiencing, in western societies, a new reality in health systems, the emergence of an epidemic of chronic diseases, which test and raise new challenges to the health systems. This exponential increase in chronic diseases has not been accompanied by updated training of health professionals in this area. The chronic illness implies a bilateral relationship, of commitment and compromise for life, in which the involvement of the sick person must be the rule. The scope of therapeutic education (TE) is making the person autonomous and helping them to maintain or improve their quality of life. To treat patients with chronic disease, health professionals need to adapt their knowledge to their new role in the therapeutic relationship. As for the methodology, a participative observational methodology will be carried out with the training of health professionals who work in this area. It is a descriptive work based on studies and works published by the main schools working in this area, with emphasis on the School of Geneve. The purpose is to identify the problem of chronic diseases, the challenges that patients and health professionals face and how to build educational projects, exploring the use of educational tools, including digital technology.

That opportunities for gainfully employing persons with severe mental illness should be maximized is a position around which there is virtual unanimity. But identifying obstacles to this goal and ways to overcome them is another matter – one that, in different forms, has engaged members of a number of disciplines. In this volume we bring together diverse disciplinary perspectives from psychology, psychiatry, statistics, occupational therapy and psychiatric rehabilitation research, sociology and labor economics to discuss a range of topics related to employment and mental illness. The papers included here span a range of domains, from “person – level” questions of person-environment fit to the broad societal effects of labor markets. Evaluative perspectives on various approaches that the mental health community has taken in seeking to advance the employment of persons with serious mental illness are also examined. While we will not claim to have represented every perspective currently in play in research on employment for persons with mental illness, we feel this volume represents the multi-disciplinary flavor of the small but growing research establishment in this area.

The purpose of this paper is to raise issues about the design of personal health record systems (PHRs) and self-monitoring technology supporting self-care practices of an increasing number of individuals dealing with the management of a chronic disease in everyday life. It discusses the results of an ethnographic study exposing to analysis the intricacies and practicalities of managing diabetes “in the wild”. It then describe and discuss the patient-centric design of a diabetes journaling platform that followed the analysis.

The study includes ethnometodological investigation based on in depth interviews, observations in a support group for adults with type 1 diabetes, home visits, shadowing sessions and semi-structured interviews with a series of medical experts (endocrinologists, general practitioners and diabetes nurses). Findings informed the design of a proof-of-concept PHR called Tag-it-Yourself (TiY): a mobile journaling platform that enables the personalization of self-monitoring practices. The platform is thoroughly described along with an evaluation of its use with real users.

The investigation sheds light on a series of general characters of everyday chronic self-care practices, and how they ask to re-think some of the assumptions and connotations of the current medical model and the traditional sick role of the patient – often unreflectively assumed also in the design of personal technologies (e.g. PHR) to be used by patients in clinically un-controlled settings. In particular, the analysis discusses: the ubiquitous nature of diabetes that is better seen as a lifestyle, the key role of lay expertises and different forms of knowledge developed by the patient in dealing with a disease on a daily basis, and the need of more symmetrical interactions and collaborations with the medical experts.

Reported discussions suggest the need of a more holistic view of self-management of chronic disease in everyday life with more attention being paid on the perspective of the affected individuals. Findings have potential implications on the way PHR and systems to support self-management of chronic disease in everyday life are conceived and designed.

The paper suggests designers and policy makers to look at chronic disease not as a medical condition to be disciplined by a clinical perspective but rather as a complex life-style where the medical cannot be separated by other aspects of everyday life. Such shift in the perspective might suggest new forms of collaborations, new ways of creative evidence and new form of knowledge creation and validation in chronic self-care.

The paper suggests re-thinking the role of the patient in chronic-disease self-management. In particular, it suggests giving more room to the patient voice and concerns and suggest how these can enrich rather than complicate the generation of knowledge about self-care practices, at least in type 1 diabetes.

The paper sheds light on everyday intricacies and practicalities of dealing with a chronic disease. Studies of self-care practices that shed light on the patient perspectives are sporadic and often assume a clinical perspective, its assumptions (e.g. biomedical knowledge is the only one available to improve health outcome, doctors know best) and implications (e.g. compliance, asymmetry between the specialist and the patient).

The purpose of this paper is to present results from a qualitative study exploring the complaints system within New South Wales Police Force in Australia. The stories shared illustrate the impact of the complaints system on officers currently serving in this force. The study reveals how the complaints system impacts on both the working conditions and workplace environment of police officers, as well as impacting on the professional relationships amongst each other.

The study is qualitative in design, in which in-depth interviews were conducted with a sample of 14 rank and file police officers. The qualitative analysis draws upon a thematic approach and a direct reference to police officer comments and perspectives are illustrated and used to inform the framework of the discussion and implications for further research in this area.

The findings yield three central themes – “police perceptions of accountability”; “the complaints tool – a question of intra institutional justice”; and “performance impact”. These are discussed in direct relation to what police officers revealed about their experiences and thoughts on the current complaints process in New South Wales.

To review the complaints process in order to develop a more transparent process; to recognise the critiques of the complaints process, both by the general public and police officers, as valuable information to be used to inform improving the process; to consider restorative justice practices employed by other police forces as a means of finalising some complaint processes; to develop a more swift complaints process with more timely conclusions in order to minimise long-term issues such as sustained sick leave.

This paper examines the link between accountability and performance, and the unintended consequences the complaints process has on police officers at work. This examination is conducted by drawing on current rank and file police officers lived experiences.

Purpose – This chapter presents a case for reframing medical sociology to focus on diagnosis as a pivotal category of analysis via an extended literature review of the diagnosis as a tool of medicine.

Methodology/approach – Conceptual overview.

Practical implications – By reviewing the range of social functions served by diagnosis, and the similarly wide assortment of social forces that shape diagnostic categories, this chapter pushes social scientists and theorists to consider diagnosis as a cornerstone to the understanding of health, illness, and disease.

Originality/value of paper – Building on Brown's earlier call for a sociology of diagnosis, this chapter sets forth potential parameters for this field. It defines how the study of diagnosis is dissipated across myriad areas of scholarship, including medicalization, disease theory, ethics, classification theory, and history of medicine. Extirpating diagnosis and revealing it for specific discussion provides an opportunity to study topics such as illness experiences, health social movements, and disease recognition from a different and rich perspective.