In a recent attempt to update the 1948 World Health Organization definition of health as a state of complete well-being and absence of disease, it has now been proposed to change its emphasis to the ability to adapt and self manage in the face of social, physical and emotional challenges. The question how we should conceptualize such self-management, however, is rarely raised and its theoretical foundations remain largely unexplained. Still, to an increasing extent, scholars, health professionals, researchers, caretakers and policy (...) makers emphasize the great potential of self-management strategies in somatic as well as mental healthcare. Patients, so the argument runs, should not be treated... (shrink)

The distinction that De Haan and Korsten foreground in their valuable commentary between, on the one hand, medical files, and, on the other, illness records is very helpful, as it underlines that illness narratives are not bound to a specific truth regime. They operate in, and at times even across, a variety of truth regimes, within which their status and function can radically differ. In that light, De Haan and Korsten have a point when they state that “any patient’s experience” (...) “exceed[s] the domain of the medical proper”. Quoting from my contribution, they go on to... (shrink)

In recent years, there has been a rapidly increasing interest in self-management strategies in psychiatry and psychosomatic medicine. Among the conditions in which self-management is currently investigated in these contexts are bipolar disorder, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, irritable bowel syndrome, chronic fatigue syndrome (Meng, Friedberg, &...