Session 7a: Making Sense of Health, Illness and Disease through Narratives
Chair: Maria Vaccarella

Making Sense of an “Illegitimate Illness”: Discourses of Illness and Health in Narratives of Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME)
Penny Jaffray
Department of Sociology at the University of Fort Hare, East London Campus, South Africa

This paper, using descriptive narrative research analysis, explores the meaning and experience of the bodily states associated with the “illegitimate” condition referred to as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). In contrast to biomedical and social trajectories of illness, in which the interpretation and meaning given to the condition are imposed externally, the paper focuses on personal trajectories of illness, which are seen to provide individualized versions of illness experience. In addition, narrative accounts of illness are valuable in exposing the culturally shared discourses that are employed in the process of assigning meaning to illness experiences. Biomedical discourse, and the illness trajectory it supports, is identified as a dominant source of commonly shared knowledge, as is an understanding of the body divided into distinct physical and psychological components. However, a further source of commonly shared knowledge is also evident in the narratives collected for this paper and, contrary to an understanding of biomedicine as the dominant source of understanding, it appears to provide an equally dominant source of knowledge and meaning. This commonly shared knowledge is associated with the new public health movement’s health promotion discourse. In accounting for illness experiences, then, an argument can be made for the inclusion of dominant discourses imparting meaning about health.

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Stories of Understanding
Noreen Kelly
Department of Sociology, University of Bristol, United Kingdom

A great deal of research has been conducted into depression, from the seminal works of Brown in 1978, to the very different stories told by Karp in 1999 and more.  My interest lies closer to the work of the latter author and my paper will accordingly explore how narratives of depression can serve to repair the fractured self?  In drawing from 21 narratives of depression collected during my PhD fieldwork, this paper will focus specifically actors’ construct personal meanings of depression, and subsequently, how conveying these meanings in story form impacts upon the healing of various damages.  Through studying people’s stories, it frequently appears that periods of subjective experiences of loss are expressed as being intrinsic to the depression itself.  Periods of trauma to the self often develop from these losses, and familiar identities are vulnerable to becoming ruptured.  It then appears that stories are told in order for people to find ways in which they can repair, and modify their personal identities; thus they construct the ‘illness narrative’ in order to find a way to be well. Using a narrative method facilitates a focus upon how stories enable people to make sense, accept and repair the traumas they have encountered; but hearing the stories of those who have experienced depression, also provides an insight into the personal truths that people create in order to make sense of their own life experiences.  In short, these stories provide an insight into the journey that the respondents have, (and for many, continue to) travel, in their personal attempts to repair their fractured selves.

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