Imagine zooming in on health to look at individual health and zooming out to have a broader perspective on community health.
Health In Sickness Zoom In:
Kristine Barnett helped her severely autistic son by nurturing his interest instead of focusing on his limitations. He liked repetitive behaviors. He would play with a glass and look at the light, twisting it for hours on end. Instead of taking it away, she would give him 50 glasses, fill them with water at different levels and let him explore the various sounds and light shapes they produced. Jacob is now a student of theoretical physics.
Because of a medical event Dr Rangell suffers from musical hallucinations; he hears music and tunes in his head. He found that the music always has meaning. Like a dream, a fantasy, a symptom, any mental experience that wells up involuntarily from within, he discovered that the songs that are automatic, and the quality and contents of the accompanying music have psychological meaning. “My Bonnie lies over the ocean, my Bonnie lies over the sea.” is a song he hears on the day of his 67th wedding anniversary! His deceased wife’s ashes were indeed in that ocean.
Health in Sickness Zoom Out:
Andrew Solomon and David Finch describe how individuals and communities develop peer cultural identities around their “illnesses” or “disabilities”. These horizontal identities help form for example a deaf, blind, ADHD, or Asperger culture and land. Sickness is not only a pathology but an experience of diversity.
Sickness in Health Zoom In:
Carl suffered a brain injury. He experiences moderate cognitive changes. To him they are not significant. But his new self and sense of health conflicts with his old self. The comparison with what is culturally deemed healthy or normal makes him sick. Concepts of normality and health prioritize the young, slender, and privileged as well as certain communication styles and behaviors. They marginalize individuals who don’t conform to these standards and expectations.
Sickness in Health Zoom Out:
A narrow health perspective that focuses on the mechanical aspects of our bodies marginalizes individuals who are sick, or suffer from chronic illness or disability. Culturally it fosters rampant healthism, a system of unrecognized health privileges and prejudices towards those who are old or suffer from disease. Paradoxically we all know that we are only temporarily healthy. Sickness and death are our common fate.
Big Health:
Death, disease and symptoms – both individually and collectively – are facets of our wholeness. They are fishhooks for developing awareness and meaning.