Abstract
Fredrik Svenaeus has applied Heidegger’s concept of ‘being-in-the-world’ to health and illness. Health, Svenaeus contends, is a state of ‘homelike being-in-the-world’ characterised by being ‘balanced’ and ‘in-tune’ with the world. Illness, on the other hand, is a state of ‘unhomelike being-in-the-world’ characterised by being ‘off-balance’ and alienated from our own bodies. This paper applies the phenomenological concepts presented by Svenaeus to cases from a study of depression. In doing so, we show that while they can certainly enrich our understanding of depression, they can also reveal a clash between some societal definitions of illness and the individual’s definition. Phenomenological analysis may thus cause us to question what we mean, or think should be meant, by the terms ‘health’ and ‘illness’.
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Notes
These names are pseudonyms.
Also a pseudonym.
There is, of course, a vast literature on the definition of illness in sociology (such as ‘deviation from normal species function’). For purposes of this paper, we are mainly concerned with illness (which sociological literature usually defines as the individual’s subjective experience of the physical, emotional and psychological effects) rather than with disease (which is considered to be the abnormality underlying the signs and symptoms). However, as discussed in this paper, some societal understandings of illness have come to incorporate disease concepts (e.g. the popularity of the biomedical view of depression within the West), such that what lay people mean by illness and disease has become blurred.
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Acknowledgments
We wish to sincerely thank all the participants who so generously shared their time and experiences. We also wish to thank Professor Emeritus Martin Richards and the two anonymous referees for their constructive feedback, and the Arnold Gerstenberg Studentship which helped fund this research.
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Kayali, T., Iqbal, F. Depression as unhomelike being-in-the-world? Phenomenology’s challenge to our understanding of illness. Med Health Care and Philos 16, 31–39 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-012-9409-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-012-9409-5