Search

The main findings of the article are the narratives of the people suffering from epilepsy can follow common "plots"; they have a starting point, cause, and the ongoing struggle with their condition and looking for a treatment/ cure. The narratives are given by the subjects, and can be interpreted differently by each reader. The actual patient experience of illness is subjective and can have social, cultural, and religious aspects tied to them.

1. Narrative is a form in which experience is represented and recounted, in which events are presented as having a meaningful and coherent order, in which activities and events are described along with the experiences associated with them and the significance that lends them their sense for the persons involved.

2. our own responses themselves are culturally grounded, embedded in quite a different structure of aesthetic or emotional response than that of the members of society being described.

3. They were deeply committed to portraying a "subjunctive world", one in which healing was an open possibility, even if miracles were necessary.

4. Disease as represented in biomedicine is localized in the body, in discrete sites or physiological processes. The narratives of those who are subjects of suffering represents illness, by contrast, as present in a life.

Byron J. Good is a Professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard Medical School and Harvard University. His current research is on mental health services development in Asian societies, with a focus on Indonesia. He also has interests in the theory of subjectivity in society, and how political, cultural, and psychological aspects affect the subject and experience. Because the author mostly followed chronic diseases in subjects like in this article, he mostly has an overarching view of emergency response, especially if subjects don't involve emergency medical services in their narratives.

The methods used to produce the arguments in the article were ethnographic research, interviews with dozens of subjects suffering from epilepsy or similar disorder from several countries, and analysis of the subjects' narratives from psychological and anthropological viewpoints.