Multimorbidity, or the co-occurrence of two or more long-term health conditions in one person, is seen as one of the greatest challenges to contemporary healthcare services. As the WHO explains: “the ageing population, less healthy lifestyles and an increasing incidence of chronic conditions mean that multimorbidity is on the rise. This trend is a major health care challenge facing all …
Tag Archives: Chronicity
Chronic Time, Afflicted Lives
This article is part of the series: Chronic living
“Mine is an illness of time.” […] “Time has no cure.”
— Catarina
(Joao Biehl, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment, 2005: 107)
Chronic is a temporal loop: it recursively, discursively, iteratively reproduces human experience. In the domain of health and illness, this reproduction perpetuates passing time as extending suffering and stalling the very dynamic of living. …
One click away: learning to live with type 1 diabetes via Facebook
This article is part of the series: Chronic living
Karen, who has lived with type 1 diabetes for three years, explains how she is only just starting to properly manage her daily self-care, and how it interrupts her various daily routines. “There are so many unpredictable issues surrounding self-management, and learning never stops”, she says, while she accentuates all her doubts about self-care: “What will happen, …
Social Life of Chronic Living
This article is part of the series: Chronic living
Chronicity, ageing, and social life
Old-age related health conditions evolve into both a dynamic and an inert chronicity which, in the end, produces a particular quality of life when growing old: the chronification of uncertainty, insecurity, and unpredictability (Manderson, Cartwright & Hardon 2016; Eeuwijk 2020). The fragility and volatility of individual biologies cascades older persons not only into new bodily …
Long Covid, chronic fatigue syndrome and women: the shadow of hysteria
This article is part of the series: Dispatches from the pandemic
Is long Covid disseminated by newspapers?
On April 14th, 2021, the British journalist and writer George Monbiot published an article entitled “Apparently just by talking about it, I’m super-spreading long Covid.” (Monbiot, 2021). Monbiot had learned that during a recent public presentation Michael Sharpe, professor of psychology at Oxford University and founder of a clinic specialized in the …
When care is delegated: Care troikas in Danish dementia wards
This article is part of the series: Chronic living
When a person with dementia moves into a nursing home, he/she is not only physically transferred from one location to another; the relocation also involves a reconfiguration of everyday and intimate relationships of care. Whereas everyday life before the placement is primarily shared between persons with dementia and family members (1), care professionals and other residents now become the ones …