Category: Sociology of Health & Illness

In the 2007 film, originally entitled ‘Allotment’, the inimitable Omid Djalili plays a refugee doctor called Ali who consults in his allotment shed. Ali reviews the numerous medications taken by allotmenteer Charlie (played by John Henshaw). Ali indicates one packet of pills: ‘This one here is for women problems! Do you have women problems?’ Charlie looks annoyed, puzzled and then embarrassed. Why is Charlie taking drugs for a gynecological condition? Given Charlie’s dislike of visiting the health centre, his wife...

During the early-21st century, social dementia research has experienced something of an ethnic turn. This trajectory is rooted in 1990s psychosocial accounts of dementia that newly championed the perspectives of people with dementia, and the subsequent realisation that these early perspectives were rather white. In response, researchers have increasingly sought to access the dementias of minority ethnicity groups living in high-income countries. Unfortunately, rather than meaningfully engaging with a greater diversity of dementias, much of this movement toward minority ethnicity...

This blog post summarises the main themes and concerns highlighted in the 2009 paper ‘Doing being ‘on the edge’: managing the dilemma of being authentically suicidal in an online forum’. The paper begins by outlining research into suicide and highlights that research into suicidal identities from a discursive perspective has not been widely established. The research demonstrates how discursive psychology can be useful in examining how suicidal identities can be built up in internet interaction. Using discursive psychology, suicidal identities...