Abstract

Chronic pain is a complex and multilayered illness experience, and consequently a significant medical and social challenge, for several reasons. First, there often is not/no longer a clear physical cause for chronic pain, while biomedicine and Western society more broadly traditionally strongly orient to finding such a cause for diagnosis and treatment. Second, pain as such is a fundamentally private and inaccessible experience, and even more so when it is chronic in nature – for chronically ill patients, typical forms of pain communication, both verbal and non-verbal, tend to be less present, in comparison to patients suffering from acute pain. Third, chronic pain patients still experience stigma and lack of recognition, within medicine and beyond.

The processes above - how we socially construct, express and evaluate pain - are essentially discursive processes. This presentation therefore aims to understand this complexity and multilayered nature of the chronic pain experience using a mixed methods approach that combines interactional sociolinguistics and corpus-based discourse analysis. With these perspectives, interactions between patients and health professionals and research interviews with patients collected in a pain clinic are analysed, to explore the discursive construction of the body, pain, illness and medical treatment in this data set. More specifically, the complexities surrounding chronic pain that can be related to the pervasiveness of mind-body dualism in Western medical thinking are unearthed, as well as other specific constructions of the interplay between the body, the mind and the social. This serves as a basis to further explore how these constructs legitimise or delegitimise the patient’s presence in the clinical context, and its patient identity, and drive or reflect stigma. To conclude, implications for clinical practice are discussed.

CV

Jana Declercq is associate professor of professional and academic communication in English at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. She received her PhD at Ghent University (Belgium) and has also worked at the University of Groningen (the Netherlands). She is primarily interested in health and illness discourses in clinical contexts, in mass media and on social media. She takes an interdisciplinary approach to her work and combines a sociolinguistic and discourse perspective with insights and concepts from medicine, sociology, philosophy and anthropology. She teaches business communication and English for specific purposes.