Talk as social suffering: Narratives of talk in medical settings

Abstract

This paper concerns the relationship between emotion and the production of meaning in biomedical settings. It builds on Parsonian, interactionist and critical phenomenological analyses of medical encounters using the concept of social suffering and narrative analysis. Two narratives of diagnostic interviews are presented, drawn from a larger study of the conversational experiences of 21 people with multiple sclerosis living in Greater London. I draw on the dialogic nature of the narratives to discuss the suffering which the narrators typically associated with medical encounters. This had to do with the emotionality of the encounters themselves, rather than of the confirmation of disease. It was located in how structural processes may conceal the interdependence of medical knowledge and personal experience. This interpretation leads me to suggest that we may understand narratives of medical encounters as illness narratives which tell a moral story about suffering and culture. They provide a critique of universalising processes in the social experience of narrators as well as a perspective on suffering in everyday life. Recent approaches to narrative analysis suggest this critique is both performative and discursive.