Tag: stigma

My body is a cage of my own making

An accessible, 7-8 page excerpt from her book, Hunger: A Memoir Of (My) Body. Roxane Gay writes about her struggle with her weight and body image. When people commented on her body, refused to sit next to her on planes, or took food out of her grocery cart, Gay struggled to accept, and even love, her body. When she broke her ankle and needed emergency surgery she began to take a healthier approach to living in a larger sized body. Useful for classes and community groups to talk about fat-shaming.

Speaking of Addiction

Dr. Meaghan Ruddy speaks on the importance of the language that health care providers choose to talk about drug addicts, specifically opioid addicts. She shares her story of when she critiqued the label “drug-seekers” in an emergency department that had many such cases. Dr. Ruddy then calls for a focus on destigmatization for drug addiction in future generations of medical professionals. Relevant to pre-med, medical students.

Tourette Syndrome: The biomedical and the literary.

The blog “According to the Arts” is written for the general public. The posts juxtapose a medical description of an illness or disability, in this case Tourette Syndrome, with a novel in which one of the main characters exhibits the condition. The novel captures the signs and symptoms, and describes how Tourette syndrome can affect lives of people living with Tourette and of living with someone who has it. The biomedical text from a neurology journal describes the characteristic tics and behaviors. Comparing the story to the medical account shows the science vs humanities perspectives on illness and could be useful for undergraduate classes in health humanities, especially ones focused on writing. Also useful for health professions students and professionals to emphasize the human factors often missed in clinical encounters.