Hayley Redman, Judith Green, Gill Partington, Des Fitzgerald
{"title":"Reading as therapy: medicalising books in an era of mental health austerity.","authors":"Hayley Redman, Judith Green, Gill Partington, Des Fitzgerald","doi":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2509941","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14461242.2025.2509941","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In the UK, a range of everyday activities are being re-framed as interventions to promote public mental health. Drivers of this include the rising burden of mental ill-health and constrained funding for community-based arts and educational provision, in the context of austerity. A consequent interest in evaluating the health and wellbeing benefits of 'non-pharmacological' interventions has brought into play some diverse logics of effect. Taking Creative Bibliotherapy - reading and discussing fiction for therapeutic ends - as a case study, we explore what happens when these logics intersect. Our analysis draws on qualitative data on how reading is understood as therapy by those involved in one area of the UK. In accounting for what it was and how it worked, these actors negotiated a series of tensions in advocating for bibliotherapy. These included: reading is inherently worthy, but has instrumental benefits; reading is universally therapeutic, yet implicated in signalling social distinction; Bibliotherapy demands a widened vision of the 'therapeutic', yet resists medicalisation. These ambiguities, we suggest, means that Creative Bibliotherapy troubles biomedicine, in foregrounding its limitations for addressing contemporary public mental health crises, and the paucity of its dominant models of therapeutic effect.</p>","PeriodicalId":46833,"journal":{"name":"Health Sociology Review","volume":" ","pages":"1-16"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2025-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144188270","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":"Burdening patients: qualitative analysis of healthism in community-based hypertension care in China.","authors":"Bo Li","doi":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2509961","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14461242.2025.2509961","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Healthism, a neoliberal ideology that frames health as an individual responsibility and moral duty, inherently operates as a blame-the-victim framework, attributing health outcomes primarily to personal choices and behaviours. This qualitative study critically examines healthism's influence on community-based hypertension care in China, particularly its reinforcement of individualised blame and patient distress. Based on semi-structured interviews with 18 community health professionals and 17 hypertensive patients in Shenzhen, the study reveals that while self-care is promoted as essential to hypertension management, it often fosters feelings of inadequacy and social isolation, particularly among patients struggling to meet the expectations set by healthcare providers. Participants also report emotional distress exacerbated by socio-economic challenges that remain unaddressed within the healthcare system. Moreover, the individualisation of health responsibility erodes trust between patients and providers, as patients internalise failure when unable to adhere to prescribed lifestyle modifications. This study critiques the reductive association between patient autonomy and improved health outcomes, advocating for a more holistic approach to hypertension care that acknowledges broader social determinants of health and prioritises structural support for patient well-being.</p>","PeriodicalId":46833,"journal":{"name":"Health Sociology Review","volume":" ","pages":"1-17"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2025-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144183078","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}
Clayton D Thomas, Scott Feyereisen, William R McConnell, Neeraj Puro
{"title":"COVID-19 and nurse practitioner autonomy: a quantitative analysis and analytic narrative of nurse practitioner professionalisation amid physician dominance.","authors":"Clayton D Thomas, Scott Feyereisen, William R McConnell, Neeraj Puro","doi":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2504896","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/14461242.2025.2504896","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>One understudied aspect of the COVID-19 pandemic is the opportunity it provided for nurse practitioners (NPs) to practice autonomously and therefore professionalise. We undertake a quantitative analysis to understand how the pandemic impacted scope of practice laws governing NPs in the United States. We find that NPs were newly granted at least temporary autonomy in 22 US states, and that those policy changes were associated with increasing COVID-19 caseloads. We construct an analytic narrative that situates the COVID-19 pandemic in the larger context of NP professionalisation under physician dominance. We argue that NPs professionalised by achieving small wins of establishing presence, building legitimacy, forming coalitions, and gaining ubiquity between legislation and a pandemic. We use the case of NP professionalisation to build the concept of a professionalisation opportunity structure, which we define as a framework of conditions available for an occupational group to gain autonomy and which consists of periods of small wins punctuated by field-level changes. A professionalisation opportunity structure provides an explanation of professionalisation that transcends intra-occupational dynamics and could be applied to other healthcare occupations seeking to professionalise under physician dominance.</p>","PeriodicalId":46833,"journal":{"name":"Health Sociology Review","volume":" ","pages":"1-17"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2025-05-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144095374","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}
Health Sociology ReviewPub Date : 2025-03-01Epub Date: 2025-02-18DOI: 10.1080/14461242.2025.2461332
Aileen Collier, Michael Chapman, Annmarie Hosie
{"title":"'I think it's wrong, but it helps' - a focused ethnography of benzodiazepine practices in specialist palliative care.","authors":"Aileen Collier, Michael Chapman, Annmarie Hosie","doi":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2461332","DOIUrl":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2461332","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Benzodiazepines are a class of drug extensively used in palliative care. Their use has predominantly been studied within a biomedical framework. Our study instead focused on the sociocultural aspects of benzodiazepine practices. We aimed to explore clinicians, patients and family members' values, beliefs, knowledge and feelings regarding use of benzodiazepines, including in-situ clinical decision-making processes, affects and actions. Social theory understandings of affect, the body and of suffering provided the theoretical lens through which data were analysed. Analysis generated the following themes: (1) A special specialty; (2) The suffering body and the moral imperative to 'settle; (3) The liminal body - living and dying; and (4) Organizational realities. Use of benzodiazepines were largely governed by social and moral norms, cultural expectations and organizational realities as part of affective assemblages of care.</p>","PeriodicalId":46833,"journal":{"name":"Health Sociology Review","volume":" ","pages":"42-58"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143442231","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}
Health Sociology ReviewPub Date : 2025-03-01Epub Date: 2024-09-15DOI: 10.1080/14461242.2024.2398250
Kate LaForge
{"title":"'Just because I'm smiling doesn't mean I'm not in pain': navigating the layered stigma of chronic pain and suicidality in social worlds.","authors":"Kate LaForge","doi":"10.1080/14461242.2024.2398250","DOIUrl":"10.1080/14461242.2024.2398250","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article aims to provide an illustrated account of layered stigmatisation processes and consequences for those who experience chronic pain and accompanying suicidality. Using constructivist grounded theory, I draw from 20 in-depth interviews conducted from 2022 to 2023 to explore how chronic pain and suicidality operate within people's social worlds. Findings demonstrate how layered stigmatising processes, occurring based on chronic pain and suicidality, operate consistently across multiple social arenas to create interactional troubles, which result in enduring negative social, emotional, and financial impacts. Three themes were constructed, including (1) self-stigma and the multiple roles of the family, (2) missed connections, and (3) anticipated stigma and workplace discrimination. Taken together, themes support the overarching category, 'interactional troubles'. Findings suggest a need for attunement to stigmatising processes' omnipresence and the depth of their consequences. Clinical interventions may benefit from emphasizing participants' social worlds and incorporating the complexity of navigating social arenas given layered stigmatisation. Moreover, policies that support those with chronic pain and mental illness could offset the long-term negative economic consequences of discrimination.</p>","PeriodicalId":46833,"journal":{"name":"Health Sociology Review","volume":" ","pages":"92-107"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142298486","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}
Health Sociology ReviewPub Date : 2025-03-01Epub Date: 2025-02-17DOI: 10.1080/14461242.2025.2464621
Sarah Maslen
{"title":"Doing home: palliative care in 'third places'.","authors":"Sarah Maslen","doi":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2464621","DOIUrl":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2464621","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>People living with life-limiting illnesses often talk about their ideal experience of 'care' as one where the care itself is hidden. Situated in the sociological literature on places and materialities of palliative care, in this paper I examine the hiding of care in a small, non-clinical respite house in an Australian city. Care is hidden by the at-homeness that staff, guests and volunteers alike all do. Working with Oldenburg's notion of 'third places,' I show how in this illness context the separation between home, work and other places in the community can blur, with respite services 'standing in' for the family home, or acting as a 'homely' extension of the hospital. Such places meet diverse needs beyond pure sociability as in Oldenburg's original conceptualisation.</p>","PeriodicalId":46833,"journal":{"name":"Health Sociology Review","volume":" ","pages":"8-24"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143434284","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}
Health Sociology ReviewPub Date : 2025-03-01Epub Date: 2024-12-31DOI: 10.1080/14461242.2024.2432881
Erica Borgstrom, Simon Cohn, Annelieke Driessen
{"title":"Multidisciplinary team meetings: dynamic routines that (re)make palliative care.","authors":"Erica Borgstrom, Simon Cohn, Annelieke Driessen","doi":"10.1080/14461242.2024.2432881","DOIUrl":"10.1080/14461242.2024.2432881","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Multidisciplinary team meetings are part of the everyday working life of palliative care staff. Based on ethnographic material from community and hospital palliative care teams in England, this article examines these meetings as dynamic routines. Although intended to have a prescribed format to review deaths and collect standardised information to monitor service performance, in practice, the content and conduct of the meetings were fluid, reflecting how this structure did not always match the concerns held by the team. The meetings provided a means for the team to collectively enact and weigh up different values through distributing the care and responsibility for individual patients across the team; jointly 'feeling their way' to determine what care should be offered and in what form; and by caring for their own professional wellbeing in the context of metric-driven healthcare. We observed how staff experienced tensions in 'documenting care' because of a concern that this misrepresented what they felt were core aspects of their role. Whilst team meetings may be considered a formal, routine part of teamwork and care, we interpret them as a dynamic social practice during which palliative care teams continually question 'what really matters' and (re)make what palliative care practice should entail.</p>","PeriodicalId":46833,"journal":{"name":"Health Sociology Review","volume":" ","pages":"77-91"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142907779","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}
Health Sociology ReviewPub Date : 2025-03-01Epub Date: 2024-12-02DOI: 10.1080/14461242.2024.2432871
Malene Lue Kessing, Alan Petersen
{"title":"Empathetic knowledge: conceptualising modes of knowing within families marked by illness.","authors":"Malene Lue Kessing, Alan Petersen","doi":"10.1080/14461242.2024.2432871","DOIUrl":"10.1080/14461242.2024.2432871","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>While many sociologists have conceptualised medical and experiential modes of knowing health and illness, less attention has been given to the concept of empathetic knowledge. That is, knowledge derived from close association with others living with a particular condition. This article investigates empathetic modes of knowing among families marked by illness, drawing on 52 h of video recordings of support group sessions for children of parents with mental illness in Denmark and interviews with 11 participating children. Inspired by the sociology of empathy, the analysis shows that empathetic knowledge involves knowing illness from the outside (through observations of the ill person's body) and from the inside (through the affective impressions left on the next of kin's own body). This empathetic knowledge is relational, bodily and affective, and, together with other ways of knowing, it shapes everyday lives and projects imagined futures. The article demonstrates that the concept of empathetic knowledge can advance our sociological understandings of next of kin.</p>","PeriodicalId":46833,"journal":{"name":"Health Sociology Review","volume":" ","pages":"108-122"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"142773498","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}
Health Sociology ReviewPub Date : 2025-03-01Epub Date: 2025-02-17DOI: 10.1080/14461242.2025.2461335
Sarah Maslen, Rebecca E Olson, Aileen Collier
{"title":"Relational approaches to conceptualising, measuring and enacting wellbeing and care in palliative and end-of-life contexts.","authors":"Sarah Maslen, Rebecca E Olson, Aileen Collier","doi":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2461335","DOIUrl":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2461335","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46833,"journal":{"name":"Health Sociology Review","volume":" ","pages":"1-7"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143434286","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}
Health Sociology ReviewPub Date : 2025-03-01Epub Date: 2025-03-11DOI: 10.1080/14461242.2025.2467908
Amalie Martinus Hauge, Didde Boisen Andersen
{"title":"Who cares about the dying? - Unpacking integration of palliative care and oncology in the Danish context.","authors":"Amalie Martinus Hauge, Didde Boisen Andersen","doi":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2467908","DOIUrl":"10.1080/14461242.2025.2467908","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Integrating palliative care into the trajectories of patients with incurable cancer has been a priority for years. Yet, the intended outcomes of this integration remain elusive. Many patients with advanced cancer continue to receive so-called aggressive treatments in the end-of-life phase or miss out on specialised palliative care entirely. To examine this impasse in the Danish context, we employ the concept of <i>professional value scripts</i> to analyse policy documents and guidelines aimed at guiding professionals working with this patient group. The three identified scripts - cancer treatment, medical palliation and holistic palliative care - embody a distinct understanding of integration, contributing to the challenges of forging an integrated approach. We argue that the central role of the cancer treatment script in patient trajectories creates an obligatory passage point, influencing both the symbolic and practical enactment of integrated palliative care throughout these trajectories.</p>","PeriodicalId":46833,"journal":{"name":"Health Sociology Review","volume":" ","pages":"59-76"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2025-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143598120","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}