Storied Health and Illness: Communicating Personal, Cultural, and Political Complexities

Health and illness are storied experiences that necessarily entail personal, cultural, and political complexities. For all of us, communicating about health and illness requires a continuous negotiation of these complexities and a delicate balance between what we learn about the biology of disease from providers and our own very personal, subjective experiences of being ill.

Storied Health and Illness brings together dozens of noteworthy scholars, both established and emerging, in a provocative collection that embraces narrative ways of knowing to think about, analyze, and reconsider our own and others' health beliefs, behaviors, and communication. Comprehensive content reflects the editors' substantial research in integrative health, narrative care, and innovative ways of improving well-being and quality of life in personal relationships, healthcare, the workplace, and community settings.

Unique narrative approaches to the study of health communication include:

14 chapters written by 22 contributors who use engaging stories from their own research or personal experience to introduce and ground foundational communication concepts in healthcare, health promotion, community support, organizational wellness, and other health-related sites of interest.

Compelling stories of individuals living with the inherent challenges and unexpected opportunities of mental illness, addiction, aging, cancer, dialysis, sexual harassment, miscarriage, obesity, alopecia, breastfeeding, health threats to immigrant workers, developmental differences, and youth gun violence.

36 Health Communication in Action (HCIA) sidebars that highlight applied research of innovative health communication scholars in their own words and then prompt readers to think more deeply about their own perspectives and experiences.

Theorizing Practice boxes that encourage readers to reflect on stories that describe significant experiences in their own and others lives as they consider assumptions and enlarge their viewpoints in previously unimagined ways.

Titles of related interest also available from Waveland Press: Geist-Martin et al., Communicating Health: Personal, Cultural, and Political Complexities (ISBN 9781577667445) and Kreps-Thornton, Health Communication: Theory and Practice, Second Edition (ISBN 9780881336436).

"I think this is a very needed book, highlighting narrative health communication issues as a theoretical and methodological approach in a wide variety of healthcare contexts. The book benefits from the inclusion of multiple authors in an anthology format. At the same time, it incorporates sufficient foundational and applied information to be useful for students encountering narrative approaches for health for the first time." --Liliana Herakova, University of Maine

"This thoughtful, inviting text tackles the complexities of health communication from the frequently missing perspective of storytelling. Human beings are natural storytellers and this text gives voice to the idea that, as a whole, individual health can be understood as a series of interconnected stories. Storied Health and Illness represents a vigorous examination of the multiple, interconnected, personal, social, political, and cultural realities that shape our stories and, consequently, shape our health." --Elizabeth Rattine-Flaherty, St. Louis College of Pharmacy