The Construction of the Sense of Grip on Chronic Disease. Clinical and Ethical Implications from Health Psychology Perspectives

Abstract

Health is not an entity or a static definition, but a dynamic and local process. From our clinical perspective on health psychology, we consider health as a multidimensional process that is generated from the connection between several experiential trajectories: bodily, affective, cognitive, relational, cultural, and historic. Chronicity, despite its seemingly meaning of staticity, cannot be considered as a stable illness condition. Our interest is about the construction of a sense of “health” also in nonreversible conditions of disease. In this contribution, we present the clinical perspective of the Sense of Grip on chronic disease (SoGoD, Freda et al., 2019; Savarese et al., 2020). By SoGoD, we refer to the narrative sensemaking processes of the chronic disease by means of five semiotic functions: temporal articulation, integration of disease, emotional regulation, social interaction, and agentive processes. By analyzing the narrative construction of the disease in such functions, we can grasp personalized styles of sensemaking of the disease experience. This evaluation is functional to set up personalized intervention to foster the process of adjustment to the disease/patient engagement in the healthcare setting. By SoGoD our aim is overcoming the dichotomy between evidence and ethics-based approaches by an abductive approach; it is not a matter of refuting evidence-based approaches in health but of integrating normative frames and subjective processes in a semiotic perspective aiming at more effective subjective health trajectories and adjustments to chronic disease.