Discourses Of Disease

This edited volume includes studies of discourses about bodily and psychiatric illness in modern China, bringing together scholarships that reconfigure the fields of history, literature, film, psychology, anthropology, and gender studies by tracing the pathological path of China through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into the new millennium.

Material Discourses of Health and Illness applies discursive approaches to the field of health psychology, in stark contrast to the bio-medical model of health and illness. The discursive approach uses the person's experience and feelings as the central focus of interest, whereas the more traditional models regarded these as coincidental and relatively unimportant. The book provides an accessible and compelling introduction to social constructionist and discursive approaches to those with limited previous knowledge of socio-linguistic theory and research. It provides practical examples of how these approaches can be applied to the field of health psychology with a collection of sophisticated discursive analyses which demonstrate the distinctive contribution that can be made by psychologists to a field that has been largely dominated by sociologists and anthropologists.

Bringing together contributions from a variety of academic disciplines, this work addresses the importance of the media in shaping and reflecting public perceptions and attitudes to health and illness.

In this book Richard Gwyn demonstrates the centrality of discourse analysis to an understanding of health and communication. Focusing on language and communication issues he demonstrates that it is possible to observe and analyze patterns in the ways in which health and illness are represented and articulated by both health professionals and lay people. Communicating Health and Illness: · Explores culturally validated notions of health and sickness and the medicalization of illness · Surveys media representations of health and illness · Considers the metaphoric nature of talk about illness · Contributes to the ongoing debate in relation to narrative based medicine

Reprint of the original, first published in 1883.