Archives
Overcoming the Stigma of Chronic Illness
Strategies for normalisation of a 'spoiled identity'
Neville Millen
School of Social Inquiry, Faculty of Arts, Deakin University, Waurn Ponds, Victoria Australia
Christine Walker
Chronic Illness Alliance Inc, 818 Burke Rd., Camberwell, Victoria, Australia
Abstract
This paper addresses the concept of chronic illness as a socially constructed experience of stigma. The stigma of having a chronic illness affects the person's self-concept, capacity to adapt to the illness and the quality of his/her social networks. Social stigma is a de-legitimising social process derived from both popular and medical views of chronic illness.
Based on research into the coping strategies of a range of people with long-term, serious chronic illnesses, the paper argues that government health policies and services in Australia can best help people with chronic illness by supporting their self-help groups and community-based activities.
Keywords
chronic illness, health policy, medical classification, self-concept, self-help groups, stigma
References
Alonza AA and Reynolds NR (1995) Stigma HIV and AIDS: an exploration and elaboration of a stigma trajectory, Social Science and Medicine 41(3): 303-315.
Australian Health Ministers' Conference (1992) National Mental Health Policy, Canberra: AGPS.
Berger PL and Luckmann T (1967) The Social construction of reality, London, UK: Allen Lane.
Bury MR (1990) Social constructionism and the development of medical sociology, Sociology of Health and Illness 8(2): 135-169.
Cahnman WJ (1968) The stigma of obesity, The Sociological Quarterly 9(3): 283-99.
Comaroff J (1982) Medicine: symbol and ideology. In P Wright and A Treacher (eds) The problem of medical knowledge: examining the social construction of medicine, Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh Uni Press: 49-69.
Conrad P (1987) The experience of illness: recent and new directions, Research in the Sociology of Health Care 6: 1-31.
Eisenberg L (1977) Disease and illness: distinctions between professional and popular ideas of sickness, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 1: 9-23.
Figlio K (1982) How does illness mediate social relations? Workmen's compensation and medicolegal practices, 1890-1940. In P Wright and A Treacher (eds) The problem of medical knowledge: examining the social construction of medicine, Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh Uni Press: 174-224.
Fitzgerald MH and Paterson KA (1995) The hidden disability dilemma for the preservation of self, Journal of Occupational Science (Aust) April 29(1): 13-21.
Frank AW (1990) Bringing bodies back in: a decade review, Theory, Culture and Society 7(1): 131-162.
Frank AW (1991) At the will of the body: reflections on illness, Boston, Mass: Houghton Mifflin.
Frank AW (1995,) The Wounded storyteller: body, illness and ethics, Chicago, III: University of Chicago Press.
Goffman E (1963) Asylums: essay's on the social situation of mental patients and other inmates, Harmondsworth. UK: Penguin.
Goffman E (1968) Stigma: notes on the management of spoiled identity, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin.
Good M-J, Del Vecchio et al (eds) (1992) Pain as human experience: cm anthropological perspective, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Kirmayer LJ (1988) Mind and body as metaphors. hidden values in biomedicine. In M Lock and DR Gordon (eds) Biomedicine examined, Dordrecht: Kluwer: 57-93.
Kleinman A (1988) The illness narratives: suffering, healing and the human condition, New York, US: Basic Books.
Lewis J (1996) Experiencing HIV as a status passage. Paper presented at American Sociological Association (ASA) Annual Association Conference.
Little JM (1995,) Humane medicine, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Loudon I (1980) Chlorosis, anaemia and anorexia nervosa, British Medical Journal 281:1669-70.
Lupton D (1995) Medicine as culture: illness, disease and the body in western societies, London, UK: Sage Publications.
Mead GH (1934) Mind, self and society, Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press.
Millen, Neville T and Walker, Christine (1997) Chronicles of chronic illness, Paper presented to the First Conference of Chronic Illness Alliance, Melbourne, Australia.
Millen N, Peterson C and Walker C (1999) Chronic fatigue syndrome: the consumer experience of anomaly. In M Collis, L Munro and S Russell (eds) Sociology for a new millennium: challenges and prospects, The Australian Sociological Association Conference Proceedings, Monash University, Melbourne: 127-141.
Royer A (1995) Living with chronic illness, Research in Sociology of Health Care 12: 25-48.
Sacks O (1995) An anthropologist on Mars, New York. US: Picador/Pan Macmillan.
Siddall AC (1982) Chlorosis-etiology reconsidered, Bulletin of History of Medicine, 56: 254-60.
Sontag S (1978) Illness as metaphor, New York: Anchor.
Sontag S (1989) AIDS and its metaphors, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Turner BS (1984) The body and society; explorations in social theory, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Turner BS (1987) Medical power and social knowledge, London, UK: Sage.
Walker C (1999) Meanings of chronic illness: usage of the term ‘chronic illness' by clinicians, policymakers and consumers in current literature, Australia: Health Issues Centre.
Ware NC (1992) Suffering and the social construction of illness: the de-legitimation of illness experience in chronic fatigue syndrome, Medical Anthropology Quarterly 6(4): 347-361.
Zola IK (1991) Bringing our bodies and ourselves back in: reflections on a past, present and future medical sociology, Journal of Health and Social Behaviour 32: 1-16.
eContent Home