Laten is moeilijk om te doen. Lijden in de praktijk van het revalidatiecentrum

Samenvatting

Abstract: Active suffering in rehabilitation practice. While contemporary health care discourse is dominated by notions as citizenship, autonomy and care consumers, the suffering that often comes along with chronic disease and disability is silenced. Suffering is silenced, because it is associated with entire passivity and because passive suffering reduces a person with disabilities to the disability. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork from a centre of physical rehabilitation, we make the opposite movement and seek to articulate suffering in the day-to-day activities of rehabilitation care. People do not passively endure suffering, or so we show, but actively deal with their concrete suffering. They do so in different ways, from which we unraveled three different ones. First, suffering is translated in the sense that it is transferred and translated. Second, active suffering involves that a person manages his situation. Third, dealing with suffering implies that people create a space where suffering may exist.