The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness

I was alone because of the ways that we have allowed ourselves to believe that the self, rather than community, must do all the healing.

Ethical loneliness is what happens when wrongs are compounded by going cruelly unacknowledged.

Concerned about “the thousand intricate problems . . . which perplex those who struggle to-day in our teeming city hives,” the neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell wondered, “Have we lived too fast?” He published Wear and Tear; or, Hints for the Overworked not in 2021, but in 1871. Mitchell is one of the men responsible for diagnosing an epidemic of hys

“Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it,” writes Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain. “To have pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt.”

our medical system, for all its extraordinary capabilities, is ill-equipped to handle the steep rise in this kind of chronic illness. That system is great at providing acute care and terrible at managing the complexities of long-term care.

Being heard by your doctor isn’t just an emotional need but a physical one: patients benefit clinically from feeling cared for. The emotional and the physical, science is learning, are more intertwined than we once understood. Many studies have suggested that emotional care—interpersonal warmth—has a measurable effect on patients’ outcomes. For exa

Ethical loneliness is what happens when wrongs are compounded by going cruelly unacknowledged.

modern medicine’s stigmatization of patients who lack clear-cut test results continues to be a chief shortcoming of the American health care system, which, in its understandable embrace of authoritative answers, struggles to acknowledge what it does not know.

This is the real tragedy of our cultural psychologization of diseases we don’t understand: the ways such dismissals leave patients to suffer alone, their condition turned into a character flaw.

You cannot muscle your way to health when you are chronically ill. Rather, one way of coming to terms with an amorphous systemic disease is recognizing that you are sick, that the illness will come and go, and that it is not the kind of illness you can conquer.