A bitterness that transcends words: Exploring the social reality of suffering in illness

Prior research studies have often taken suffering as a “natural” consequence of illness, neglecting its social character. In this dissertation I move beyond the taken-for-granted understanding of suffering and explore the questions: How can we understand the lived experience of suffering? Are there rules or a social logic that govern the expression and treatment of suffering? What are the dominant social and cultural images of suffering? And how does suffering inform sociological understandings of social reality and interaction?; To answer these questions I use qualitative research (observations and in-depth interviews) to explore first, the experience of individuals living in the midst of suffering and illness, second, the strategies health providers use to address suffering in patients, and third, the larger social and cultural conditions that shape and influence experiences and interactions around suffering. On the individual level, I found that suffering in illness changes individuals' orientation toward everyday reality. Their relationship towards their body, their thoughts, time, and social relationships shift. This new orientation toward reality makes it difficult for individuals to understand and communicate the experience of suffering to themselves and others. At the interactional level, healthcare providers often rely on patterned ways of addressing suffering that obscure and transform its presence in illness. I suggest that medical staff routinize, normalize, manage, and witness suffering in medical settings. Finally, the collective representations of suffering, with descriptions of stoic sufferers coupled with mediated images of dramatic suffering, also tends to obscure attention toward and understanding of non-dramatic suffering. Thus, the amount and degree of suffering occurring in medical settings becomes muted and hidden through a combination of individual, organizational, and cultural factors.