By portraying the circumstances of people living with chronic conditions in radically different contexts, from Alzheimer’s patients in the UK to homeless people with psychiatric disorders in India, Managing Chronicity in Unequal States offers glimpses of what dealing with medically complex conditions in stratified societies means. While in some places the state regulates and intrudes on the most intimate aspects of chronic living, in others it is utterly and criminally absent. Either way, it is a present/absent actor that deeply conditions people’s opportunities and strategies of care. This book explores how individuals, groups and communities navigate uncertain and unequal healthcare systems, in which inherent moral judgements on human worth have long-lasting effects on people’s wellbeing. This is key reading for anyone wishing to deconstruct the issues at stake when analysing how care and chronicity are entangled with multiple institutional, economic, and other circumstantial factors. How people access the available informal and formal resources as well as how they react to official diagnoses and decisions are important facets of the management of chronicity. In the arena of care, people with chronic conditions find themselves negotiating restrictions and handling issues of power and (inter)dependency in relationships of inequality and proximity. This is particularly relevant in current times, when care has given in to the lure of the market, and the possibility of living a long and fulfilling life has been drastically reduced, transformed into a ‘reward’ for the few who have been deemed worthy of it.

The book addresses contemporary challenges related to chronicity in the context of life and health. The book is structured across 11 core axes to aid healthcare professionals in understanding the topic. The axes address issues such as health promotion and quality of life, the transition from ephemerality to chronicity throughout life, the presence of chronicity in childhood and adolescence, violence against transgender people, the coexistence of communicable and non-communicable chronic diseases in the community, work-related chronic diseases, chronicity in the elderly, and strategies for sustainable development in this context. It discusses the importance of palliative care for patients facing finitude and explores the role of spirituality in coping with chronicity. In summary, the book aims to present a comprehensive and multidimensional perspective on chronicity, providing valuable insights for the teaching, research, extension, and care sectors.

This book comprehensively and critically discusses chronicity as a crucial challenge for the future of medicine in an era of aging populations and the steady growth of non-communicable comorbidities. It describes how health systems that are still designed and based on the treatment of acute diseases are suffering from crowded emergency rooms and growing conflicts between patients, while medical staff increasingly face frustration and the risk of burn-out. The author not only shares her own clinical and personal experience in the care of end stage COPD or ALS patients with respiratory insufficiency, but also explores how primary care, incremental medicine and initiative medicine can improve the care provided for these patients. In turn, the book examines how developing countries are facing the chronicity issue in their daily struggles with communicable diseases like diarrhea and infections, and with non-communicable ones like obesity, diabetes and asthma. It also discusses the cost-related challenges that could accompany a possible paradigm shift from chronic to curable status, as was the case with hepatitis C. Due to the inevitable link between chronicity and end of life, the author tactfully addresses palliative care, focusing on the importance of shared decision-making as well as a full awareness of the future scenarios. Uniquely reflecting life-long clinical experience and stimulating discussion on a highly topical issue, this book appeals to a wide readership, from health professionals through caregivers to patients with chronic conditions.

This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2013. Chronicity is about people rather than medical conditions. It may best be understood as a complex phenomenon in which multiple elements interact with each other in unpredictable ways to bring about unanticipated changes. Making sense of chronicity, therefore, requires that we not only pay attention to all aspects of experiencing the condition, but also think about the relationships between them.

This book explores how people draw upon spiritual, religious, or faith-based practices to support their mental wellness amidst forms of chronicity. From diverse global contexts and spiritual perspectives, this volume critically examines several chronic conditions, such as psychosis, diabetes, depression, oppressive forces of colonization and social marginalization, attacks of spirit possession, or other forms of persistent mental duress. As an inter- and transdisciplinary collection, the chapters include innovative ethnographic observations and over 300 in-depth interviews with care providers and individuals living in chronicity, analyzed primarily from the phenomenological and hermeneutic meaning-making traditions. Overall, this book depicts a modern global era in which spiritualty and religion maintain an important role in many peoples’ lives, underscoring a need for increased awareness, intersectoral collaboration, and practical training for varied care providers. This book will be of interest to scholars of religion and health, the sociology and psychology of religion, medical and psychological anthropology, religious studies, and global health studies, as well as applied health and mental health professionals in psychology, social work, physical and occupational therapy, cultural psychiatry, public health, and medicine.

This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2013. Chronic illness, together with people experiencing or treating it, became almost mute to predominant biomedical narration pervasive in mainstream media, education, medical and pharmaceutical industry. Contributors in this book aim to represent, discuss, and preserve the vanishing voices and stories on chronic illness from dimensions beyond medicine so that we may make sense of chronicity with the diversity it deserves. The book also incorporates research articles which share important stories about chronicity. These stories, same as chronic illness in our world, should not be treated in a ‘standardised’ way. Each reader, we hope, will relate the meanings of chronicity in this book to his or her own world.

"A major collection of essays from leaders in the field of medical anthropology, Chronic Conditions, Fluid States pays much-needed attention to one of the greatest challenges currently faced by both the wealthiest and poorest of nations. For anyone wishing to think critically about chronic illness in cross-cultural perspective, the social forces shaping this issue, and its impact on the lived experiences of people worldwide, there is no better place to start than this pioneering volume."---Richard Parker, Columbia University, and editor-in-chief, Global Public Health --