 |
"Camp Pain": Talking with Chronic Pain Patients
By Jean E. Jackson
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000
"Camp Pain": Talking with Chronic Pain Patients, based on ethnographic fieldwork in 1986 in a chronic pain treatment facility in New England, explores the many meanings of chronic pain in today's society. The narratives offered by patients at this center vividly illustrate the difference between disease as a biological phenomenon and disease as a lived experience. The book takes an interpretive approach, focusing on what these patients' experiences mean to them and how this meaning is socially constructed.
The following topics are discussed: western concepts of disease, health, mind, and body; experience and the way we describe it; assumptions about cause and effect; stigma, shame, and guilt; and orthodox biomedicine versus alternative approaches to restoring and maintaining health. The nature of pain itself is also explored, paying special attention to the difficulties encountered when attempting to define pain, and the sources of controversy among pain specialists.
Because severe chronic pain can dominate one's life and can carry extensive moral opprobrium, it can easily threaten the ability to maintain identity. Conversations with patients show how they attempt to reconcile these powerfully negative impacts on personal self-esteem with their understanding of themselves. A critical theme is the psychological burden imposed on many sufferers when they are not seen to have "real" pain. These sufferers literally lived the paradox of pain: that it is absolutely real but also that it must be treated as in the mind.
The book also looks at the pain center as an institution, discussing its ideology and policies, illustrating their implementation in daily practice. Attention is paid to the center as a therapeutic community, a focus completely lacking in the literature on pain centers.
Contents:
1. A Baffling Phenomenon
2. Summer Camp? Boot Camp? An Introduction to CPC
3. The Painful Journey
4. "Getting with the Program"
5. Building and Resisting Community
6. "Winners": CPC Converts
7. Me/Not-Me: Self, Language, and Pain
8. Conclusions: The Puzzles of Pain
9. Coda: A Note on Approach
10. Appendix 1 CPC Patients and Staff
11. Appendix 2. Interview Questions