What is suffering, who feels it and where does it lie?

Time: 12-1pm

Abstract: Drawing on the forthcoming book, Bodies and Suffering: Emotions and Relations of Care (Routledge, 2017), in this talk I outline a series of considerations for how we might think differently about human suffering, with a focus on challenging how suffering is often ‘treated’ in healthcare settings. In particular, I will propose a model of suffering as a relational entity that moves across persons, relationships, settings and even generations, including how it is manifest in the therapeutic encounter. Drawing on a decade of work with oncology doctors and nurses and people living advanced cancer, I posit that suffering-in-practice challenges the assumed borders between people, often concealing the true ‘nature’ of suffering as negotiated, contingent and collectively orchestrated. This work leads me to emphasise the importance of refocusing on the desires and emotions of clinicians, patients and families that underpin therapeutic processes and disease trajectories (e.g. desire for recovery, for death, for survival, for hope, for recognition, for truth telling, for acceptance). Such affective atmospheres are often concealed when we ‘treat’ individual biophysical suffering simplistically, with deleterious effects in a range of clinical settings.   

Bio: Alex Broom is Professor of Sociology in the School of Social Sciences at UNSW Australia. He is recognized as an international leader in the social aspects of medicine and health, specialising in illness and wellness experiences; the therapeutic encounter; health and medical decision-making; experiences of suffering, healing and survivorship; and, the dynamics of caregiving. He has published over 200 publications including 12 books, and convenes the Health Stream of UNSW’s Practical Justice Initiative. He is also a PLuS Alliance Fellow - a partnership between King’s College London, Arizona State University and UNSW. Recent authored monographs include Dying: A Social Perspective on the End of Life’ (Routledge, 2015) and Bodies and Suffering: Emotions and Relations of Care (Routledge, 2017, with Ana Dragojlovic).
 

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