Making Sense of Illness

What are people's beliefs about health? What do they do when they feel ill? Why do they go to the doctor? How do they live with chronic disease? This lucid introduction to the social psychology of health and illness addresses these and other questions about how people make sense of illness in everyday life, either alone or with the help of others.

Alan Radley reviews findings from medical sociology, health psychology and medical anthropology to demonstrate the relevance of social and psychological explanations to questions about disease and its treatment. He also presents a critical account of related issues - stress, health promotion and gender differences.

Topics covered include:

· illness, the patient and society

· ideas about health and staying healthy

· recognizing symptoms and falling ill

· the healing relationship: patients, nurses and doctors

Relating to the reader's own experience, Making Sense of Illness provides a comprehensive introduction to relevant research and a critical commentary on explanations of health and illness in social life. It will be essential reading for students of psychology, sociology and health studies.

British orientation/incl. illness, the patient & society/ ideas about health & staying healthy/healing relationships.

Alan Radley is Professor of Social Psychology in the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough, and one of the founders of the undergraduate programme in Social Psychology that received its first intake of students in 1974.

His research interests during this time have centred upon the social and psychological aspects of health and illness, particularly the ways in which people live with the diagnosis and treatment of serious disease. He has worked on a number of funded projects, including family response to one of its members receiving coronary bypass graft surgery, women living with heart disease, the role of counsellors in GP surgeries, the needs of patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease in the outpatient consultation, and recovery in hospital using photo-production as a technique. Recently he has studied the experience of homelessness using photo-production techniques, first in London and now in Auckland, New Zealand (in collaboration with Dr Darrin Hodgetts).

His work has been published in a range of journal papers and chapters, as well as in his own books that include, Prospects of Heart Surgery (Springer, 1988); The Body and Social Psychology (Springer, 1991); and Making Sense of Illness (Sage, 1994). He has also published a text, In Social Relationships, (Open University Press, 1991), edited the volume Worlds of Illness (Routledge, 1993) and contributed to Ideological Dilemmas (Sage, 1988), with colleagues in Social Psychology at Loughborough.