Robert Winston's Superhuman: spectacle, surveillance and patient narrative

Health psychologists are being challenged by researchers to consider interdisciplinary approaches to health research, particularly around media representations. This article argues that the praxis and research of health psychology might benefit from strategic and interdisciplinary readings of media texts. It argues that insights from current documentary theory are important because they show us how documentary texts are structured and how medical documentary deploys techniques from medicine itself in order to effect certain persuasive discursive shifts in our wider culture. The article takes the BBC documentary series Superhuman as its example and explores this text as it involves media spectacle, medical surveillance of the body and of patients and the positioning of patient narratives of personal experiences with medical intervention.