{"title":"Conceptualising Lived Experience in Mental Health Research: Problems, Insights and Implications.","authors":"Rajvinder Samra","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.70039","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Across health research, drawing on accounts from people with lived experience is often promoted as a shift away from epistemic injustice wherein the knowledge of the marginalised is ignored/silenced. Paradoxically for people with mental distress who are given a diagnostic label, aspects of their accounts may actually be foregrounded to categorise them with mental illness/disorder. In doing this, their sense of reality (e.g., ontological experiences) can be judged to be significantly different from other people in addition to their epistemic knowledge and understanding. This points to issues of ontological differences between lived experiencers of various forms of mental distress that need deeper consideration in mental health research and practice, alongside the ongoing work on epistemic considerations. Experiencing serious mental distress can include a loss of trust in one's sensory/perceptual signals which complicates how one makes sense of experience and knowledge. The complexities around these processes is at odds with the more straightforward ideas about testimonial accuracy and speaker credibility that underpin epistemic knowledge goals. This review outlines often-overlooked issues related to ontological differences between people in the context of mental health and offers suggestions for the future.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"47 4","pages":"e70039"},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2025-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12043252/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144044182","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Allyship in Healthcare for People With Learning Disabilities as a Praxis of Respect, Attention and Collaborative Action.","authors":"Bojana Daw Srdanovic","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.70047","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>There is a dearth of literature focusing on how allyship in health may be enacted in relation to people with learning disabilities (LD). This is concerning, because people with LD are vulnerable to health inequalities and forms of medical dehumanisation including do-not-resuscitate orders, diagnostic overshadowing and overprescription of psychotropic drugs. Deploying critical disability studies as a lens through which to understand disability, this paper reviews models of disability allyship developed in healthcare, research and theatre. In doing so it advocates transformative allyship as a model that can both animate action in support of people with learning disabilities and accommodate the involvement of others, including clinicians, carers and relatives, without compromising the all-important commitment to supporting disability cultures. The paper presents and analyses ethnographic data gained through observations of eleven healthcare appointments between seven clinicians and five patients with LD, undertaken as part of the ESRC-funded study Humanising Healthcare. It documents the potential of transformative allyship in healthcare to transform harmful disablist practices through emphasising respect, attention and collaborative action while also noting that broader structural conditions and diagnostic technologies limit the extent to which clinicians can enact transformative allyship.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"47 4","pages":"e70047"},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2025-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12077749/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144079995","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Power of Naming: Discursive Politics From the Perspective of Expertise in an Intellectual Disability Advocacy Field.","authors":"Elise Wolff","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70048","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70048","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article considers how name change comes about by examining fieldwide debates among actors such as professionals and activists. Analysing a range of primary qualitative materials produced by leading US organisations over a 75-year period, it focuses on a case from the disability advocacy field in several shifts from older terms to more recent 'intellectual disability' (ID) language in the United States. As opposed to framing these changes solely as matters of identity politics or destigmatisation, I argue that these naming politics can be better historically contextualised as struggles fundamentally tied to organised lay/professional expertise and field position. Although many professionals resisted proposed changes as counterproductive, insurgent activists repeatedly marshalled their own claims to expertise surrounding the disability experience and eventually successfully pushed for the replacement of previously legitimate diagnostic terminology. This recognition of expertise, however, does not translate to equal footing among stakeholders but varies by timing and issue context. To highlight this, I differentiate between traditional and emergent 'expert identity' and extent of 'expert control'. I suggest such a perspective might be applied to a range of fields where similar disputes over language have come to occupy significant attention.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"47 4","pages":"e70048"},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2025-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12090037/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144102522","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Thinking With Post-Birth Bodies: Articulating Sociological Care for Bodies That Function Differently After Birth.","authors":"Siân M Beynon-Jones, Alankrita Anand","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70029","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70029","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper articulates a sociological approach to bodies that function differently after birth. We suggest that post-birth bodies are distributed across a variety of areas of existing scholarship and that this can make it difficult to grapple with experiences that encompass gestation, altered functioning/injury, parenting and medical knowledge. We review and synthesise this rich literature to illustrate how it can be mobilised to sociologically theorise and explore physical recovery from birth, characterising this as the development of sociological care for such bodies. Our analysis draws on autoethnographic reflection on the post-birth body of a cis/queer/neurodivergent/white/middle-class mother alongside four pilot interviews concerning experiences with post-birth bodies in England. By placing these lived experiences into thematic dialogue with existing feminist/STS and sociological scholarship we illustrate why bodies altered through birth are good for sociologists to think with and outline potential avenues for future research in this field. We suggest that a focus on care for post-birth bodies enables critical exploration of assumptions about temporal relations between pregnancy, birth and mothering/parenting, as well as how these forms of labour are socially distributed and supported.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"47 4","pages":"e70029"},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2025-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143796246","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Childhood Vaccine Hesitancy as an Interaction-Based Phenomenon.","authors":"Alice Scavarda, Mario Cardano, Luigi Gariglio","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70036","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.70036","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The paper discusses the role of the interaction between parents and healthcare professionals in overcoming or heightening childhood vaccine hesitancy. Childhood vaccine hesitancy is seen as a set of attitudes and behaviours-that is, dispositions-that are highly dependent on how trust and vulnerability intersect during vaccination appointments. Drawing on a rapid team ethnography conducted in the Northwest of Italy, we discuss how parents' trust in vaccination changes along specific trajectories, depending on how healthcare professionals manage epistemic conflicts with hesitant parents. We employ the concept of interactional trust to show how trust can be eroded or restored during specific interactions, regardless of the initial trust capital. Healthcare professionals' discursive and interactive strategies during inoculation can have long-term effects on parents' interpersonal trust and institutional trust in both immunisation and in the healthcare system. If parents and healthcare professionals fail to embrace their reciprocal vulnerability, the trust building system is flawed.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"47 4","pages":"e70036"},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2025-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11992953/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144033845","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Alex Broom, Katherine Kenny, Nadine Ehlers, Henrietta Byrne, Phillip Good
{"title":"Dying as a Collective Encounter: Relationality and Affect at the End of Life.","authors":"Alex Broom, Katherine Kenny, Nadine Ehlers, Henrietta Byrne, Phillip Good","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70046","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.70046","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The end of life is replete with relational complexities. Yet, despite the work of humanities and social science scholars in the field of death and dying, our final days and weeks are still often framed through a highly individualistic lens. As a result, the collective encounters of dying can become sidelined within the management of an individual's embodied journey. This, in some cases, has the effect of obscuring the presence and power of collective affective intensities in shaping the experience of dying. In this paper, we seek to recentre dying as a collective encounter, drawing on the experiences of people receiving care at a palliative care unit in the last few weeks or days of their life, and exploring three key affective tensions: proximity and distance, obligation and negation and acceptance and refusal. This relational framing of dying as tussle and tension allows us to comprehend the inevitable push-and-pull between the multiple bodies, subjects and (shifting) atmospheres of dying which evade atomistic, individualistic configurations of dying, often perpetuated by its medical management.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"47 4","pages":"e70046"},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2025-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144094713","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Emily Lenton, Kate Seear, Adrian Farrugia, Chris Lemoh, Elena Cama, Gemma Nourse, Carla Treloar
{"title":"Health-Related Stigma: The Affordances of Electronic Health Management Systems in the Production of Structural Stigma.","authors":"Emily Lenton, Kate Seear, Adrian Farrugia, Chris Lemoh, Elena Cama, Gemma Nourse, Carla Treloar","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70043","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70043","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Encounters with stigma in healthcare settings are well-documented. In recent years, significant attention has begun to be paid to how we can reduce these stigmas, including through the identification and reformation of structural forces that shape and sustain them. This article analyses 30 interviews conducted with clinical and nonclinical healthcare workers, as part of a larger project that aims to reduce health-related stigma for all. A major theme running through the interviews was the constitutive role of medical records in the production of stigma. Interview participants expressed several concerns about the ways such records can produce and reproduce stigma associated with numerous health conditions, identities, and practices. We examine how the very process of producing medical records can be implicated in stigma. We ask, how do systems shape data production, reproduction, access and dissemination? To what extent might processes and systems help to generate, maintain or exacerbate stigma through the demands of medical record keeping, and are reforms needed at these levels too? In addressing these questions, we work with Latour's notion of affordances to examine medical records as a technology that can reflect and reproduce social and political arrangements, including stigma. We argue that institutions and structures responsible for the governance of these systems need to contend with the important entanglements between medical record systems and stigma. We conclude with recommendations for how policymakers, health service leaders and researchers might intervene in the production of stigma afforded by these forms of communication.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"47 4","pages":"e70043"},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2025-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC12074563/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144044185","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Daniel Robins, Nik Brown, Karl Atkin, Luna Dolezal, Sarah Nettleton
{"title":"Towards a Sociology of Healthcare Robots.","authors":"Daniel Robins, Nik Brown, Karl Atkin, Luna Dolezal, Sarah Nettleton","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70033","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70033","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>We propose a sociological approach to healthcare robots that emphasises the heterogeneous ethics of mutual labour and the complex definitions of care that emerge through robot design/deployment. This argument is the product of a narrative literature review that examined assistive robots deployed in care settings. We found that although the deployment of healthcare robots has redefined the concept of care, as featured in geography, legal studies, and philosophy, it rarely appears in sociological inquiry. There are three fields that this approach to a sociology of health and illness complements. These are (1) phenomenology and the new approaches to touch and recognition in embodied relations with robots, (2) biopolitics, where the governance of life is conceptualised as a conjunction between the biological and artificial and (3) the reconfiguration of healthcare labour around mutuality, where robots both maintain and are maintained by the human. We end by suggesting that the increased implementation of robotics into care work provides a broader sociological opportunity for addressing how boundaries of 'human' can be rethought alongside new healthcare technologies.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"47 4","pages":"e70033"},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2025-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143788704","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bargaining With 'Reproductive Capital': Multilayered Stratified Reproduction in the Case of Taiwanese Gay Men Seeking Transnational Surrogacy.","authors":"Jung Chen","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70019","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70019","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Scholars in the field of social studies of reproduction have recently turned their attention to the booming cross-border reproductive industry. In the case of gay men seeking donor ova and surrogacy to become fathers, there are issues of uneven accessibility and disparity between privileged intended gay fathers and comparatively less affluent women who offer reproductive labour. Despite being the first country in Asia to legalise same-sex marriage, Taiwan still holds back on LGBTQ+ reproductive rights. This compels intended queer parents to travel abroad for assisted reproduction. This article draws on 53 in-depth interviews with Taiwanese gay men seeking transnational surrogacy. Adopting a Bourdieusian perspective, I examine how they 'bargained with' economic, social, cultural and symbolic capital to achieve reproductive goals at the intersections of sexuality, nationality, race and sociolegal constraints. When it comes to multilayered stratified reproduction, my findings highlight disparities between (1) heterosexuals and LGBTQ+ people, (2) intended gay fathers and (3) gay fathers and surrogates. This article enriches our understanding of stratified reproduction, transnational surrogacy and queer reproductive justice by introducing the concept of 'reproductive capital' that was strategically accumulated and mobilised by gay fathers in order to navigate the complex multilayered reproductive stratifications in transnational reproduction.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"47 3","pages":"e70019"},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143677171","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Michael Halpin, Meghan Gosse, Katharine Yeo, Ingrid Handlovsky, Finlay Maguire
{"title":"When Help Is Harm: Health, Lookism and Self-Improvement in the Manosphere.","authors":"Michael Halpin, Meghan Gosse, Katharine Yeo, Ingrid Handlovsky, Finlay Maguire","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70015","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70015","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>How do online communities impact men's health? How does hegemonic masculinity harm men's health? In this paper, we analyse an online looksmaxxing community that receives 6 million unique visitors per month and is aimed at men seeking to improve their appearance. We qualitatively analysed 8072 discussion board comments in total. Our findings first demonstrate how users apply a hegemonic masculine gaze as they critique men's bodies (e.g., facial asymmetries and brow ridges). Second, we show how the community encourages men to substantially alter their bodies (e.g., with leg lengthening surgeries or by mewing). Third, we argue that the community subjects users to masculine demoralisation, wherein they are seen as failed men and encouraged to self-harm. Drawing on masculinities theory, we argue that looksmaxxing and similar self-improvement communities harm the health of the men who participate in them.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"47 3","pages":"e70015"},"PeriodicalIF":2.7,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11896937/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143606460","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}