Narrating Patienthood : Engaging Diverse Voices on Health, Communication, and the Patient Experience

Engaging the reader with a variety of patient narratives and health communication scholarship, this book illustrates how narratives can create change; how differences matter; and how identity, relational, and cultural factors intersect to affect patienthood.

Diversity plays an important role in how people experience illness and healthcare as patients. Listening carefully to stories of how race, class, age, gender, sexuality, and disability can affect patient experience can be revealing and provide much needed change to health communication in the patienthood narrative. This book is a collection of vibrant and engaging essays by scholars of narrative methods in health communication. Each chapter takes readers into the fascinating world of patients who use stories from their personal lives to challenge us to rethink, reimagine, and reformulate what health communication means in practice.

Each section of the book focuses on an important aspect of the theory and practice of the patienthood narrative. Part one explores the important ways that telling and sharing patient’s stories can lead to learning, empowerment, and advocacy. Part two explores several key forms of diversity and how they affect patienthood. Part three illustrates how personal, relational, and cultural aspects of identity intersect to shape the patient experience.