Abstract
The term “psychosocial” has come to refer to a host of issues in health care. Its wide, indiscriminate usage in referring to almost any non-biophysical aspect of illness obscures or distorts the experience of illness as a “crisis of meaning.” The term “psycho-spiritual agenda” is introduced to emphasize the problems of meaning associated with illness, and to avoid the potential reductionism, pathological skew, and interventionist bias of conventional “psychosocial” analyses of the illness experience.
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References
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This case is drawn from a larger study of psychological and theological aspects of medical practice from David Barnard, “Psychological and Theological Perspectives on the Practice of Medicine: An Analysis of Competence and Limitation” Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, 1980, chapter 1. Identifying details have been altered to preserve the privacy of the principals.
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Barnard, D. Illness as a crisis of meaning: Psycho-spiritual agendas in health care. Pastoral Psychol 33, 74–82 (1984). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01086367
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01086367