Movement Between Suffering and Health-Experience of Health During Long-Term Illness

This study takes as its starting-point the assumption highlighted in previous research and theory that human beings can experience health despite chronic or severe illness. An individual's perceptions of health often change when being is faced with long-term illness, the meaning of health takes new dimensions and sets health in motion. Previous studies have focused on health related to specific diseases grounded in coping strategies or experiences of meaning in life.

This study aims to gain a deeper understanding of health, what it means for human beings with long-term illness to be in the movement between suffering and health and their motives and resources to promote and maintain health.

This study has an inductive qualitative research design with a hermeneutic approach. The data collection was carried out via in-depth interviews with seven people with long-term illnesses. The interviews were analysed inductively using reflexive thematic analysis.

Three main themes emerged in the thematic analysis: Moving between letting go and holding on, a changed attitude towards health and trusting life to carry you. The results demonstrate that for a human being with a long-term illness, the movement between suffering and health is the reality in which they live and as a movement between giving up and holding on, between grief and gratitude, and between vulnerability and nearness.

When human beings face suffering in the form of long-term illnesses, they can experience health in the ways they choose to act, relate and view their value as a human being, without any requirement for performance. The task of healthcare is to recognise the resource that people themselves possess. Healthcare professionals need a dialectical view of health and suffering to provide care that not only aims to eradicate disease but also to see what health is in times of illness.