Health as Lived Experience

Health and wellbeing are closely linked to how people understand, experience, articulate, and express health. Their personal and collective ‘lived experience’ determines (1) the success or failure of (public) health interventions, and (2) the ways people deal meaningfully with the adversaries of ageing, ill health, and death. Moreover, how people speak and exchange, are key to understanding coping mechanisms, resilience, and adaption. To deal with key future health challenges, including the accessibility, quality and staffing of health, it is crucial to gain a better understanding of the lived experience of civilians as well as health professionals (in and beyond the patient encounter). A focus on the view ‘from below’ will contribute to better public policies directed at supporting and strengthening personal and social resilience in times when sharp health decisions must be made due to the disbalance of an ageing population and limited resources.

This theme employs a variety of humanities and social sciences methodologies, including qualitative and quantitative methods, as well as cultural, historical, political, religious studies, and philosophical approaches. Focusing on the ‘lived experience’ of health and wellbeing is an important addition to the other themes’ focus on the systems, technologies and environments making up the outside circumstances that encourage and enable healthy living.

The following topics are key to ‘Health as Lived Experience’: 

1. The historical, philosophical, and cultural-religious roots of health assumptions and experiences. More precisely, it questions the existing categories and ethics of health, medicine, body, spirituality, gender, and race, to gain a better understanding of biases underlying health decisions, as well as the mechanisms that enable or hinder change.
2. Grief, consolation, and meaning-making in the face of ill health, ageing, and death.
3. The discourses of health in everyday and professional interactions and texts. How do people construe and give meaning to their health and wellbeing? How do patients and doctors co-construct and negotiate illness and treatment with special attention to specific target groups, including those experiencing insecurity, and those with low literacy or poverty.
4. Creative arts, and literature that mediate people’s lived experiences.