Reply to comment

"The very language of "illness" and "health" seems to exist not along a continuum but as an all or nothing, defined set of milestones and endpoints that undermines individual, nuanced experiences and catapults illness into the realm of battle: doctor vs. unruly body."

Interesting resonance to Illness as Metaphor and AIDS as Metaphors by Susan Sontag.

"My subject is not physical illnesses itself but the uses of illness as a figure or metaphor. My point is that illness is not a metaphor, and the most truthful way or regarding illness - and the healthiest way of being ill - is one most purified of, most resistant to, metaphoric thinking. Yet it is hardly possible to take up residence in the kingdom of the ill unpredjudiced by the lurid metaphors with which it has been landscaped. It is towards an elucidation of those metaphors, and a liberation from them, that I dedicate this inquiry."

Maybe the key here is not to deny "illness," in the sense of discomfort/pain and the wish to get beyond it, but rather a need to strip illness of many of its cultural (and personal?) metaphors? Or, perhaps better, to find alternate metaphors/stories ("an alternative to fight or flight"?) that derive more from "individual, nuanced experiences" and better provide "a vision of something other than what one is experiencing"? With that being a desideratum not only for "mental" health but "physical" health as well? Sontag's essay is a consideration principally of cancer, turberculosis, and AIDS.