The Concepts of Health, Illness and Disease
A Multidisciplinary Research Network
Project funded by the AHRC
Principal Investigator: Dr Havi Carel, UWE
Co-Investigator: Dr Rachel Cooper, Lancaster University
Project duration: January 2009 - January 2011
This research network will bring together researchers from diverse disciplines in order to explore the concepts of health, illness and disease. Developing a thorough understanding of these concepts is of crucial importance to society as a whole, because whether a condition is considered pathological often has ethical, social and economic implications. The project will address issues such as: is illness a physiological dysfunction or a social classification? How do different concepts of illness affect our treatment of ill people? Such questions are of direct relevance to issues of public concern, such as: Should the NHS pay for the treatment of nicotine addiction? Is it right for shy people to take character-altering drugs?
These questions depend on how we understand the concepts of disease, illness and health, which dimension of illness we emphasise, whether we consider particular conditions as pathological and so on. Developing an understanding of these concepts is a fundamental first step in addressing such questions. Over the past three decades, various accounts of illness have been proposed by researchers from sociology, law, philosophy, public health and economics. Often, however, proponents of various accounts have been isolated within their own discipline with an apparent unawareness of competing accounts. As a result, while there are now a number of different accounts of disease and illness available, there is no consensus about which, if any, of these accounts is ultimately acceptable and what implications each account may have.
Our proposed network will explore differences and overlaps between these different accounts. The network aims to bring together researchers from multiple disciplines to create dialogue between them, as well as between researchers and health practitioners, on the concepts of health, illness and disease. The network activities will include a series of workshops, an international conference, workshops specifically designed for health professionals and a series of public debates. The network is not only envisaged as an academic project but as a project that will contribute to public debates about health, create knowledge exchange between academia and healthcare practitioners and draw new researchers from a variety of disciplines into the network.
The aims of the network are to:
- answer an existing need for an organised network on the concepts of health, illness and disease and for pursuing meta-theoretical questions in medicine
- build links between researchers from relevant disciplines
- create a platform for knowledge exchange through meetings and workshops conducted with health professionals, presenting researchers with first-hand experience of working in healthcare
- create links with health practitioners interested in theoretical questions about their practice
- disseminate the results of research through workshops, publications and a website
- disseminate ideas to health practitioners through specially designed workshops
- disseminate results of research to the public and enable public engagement with them through public debates.
More information on the project
- About the project: A podcast interview with Dr Carel
- Podium, the AHRC magazine, discusses the project (pp.12-13)
Project Events:
Disability and Chronic Illness Workshop (UWE, 30/1/09)
Mental Disorder Workshop (Warwick, 6/3/09) - This workshop is now fully booked.
Culture-Bound Syndromes Workshop (Lancaster, 7/7/09)
