Paper short abstract:

Through photography workshops, participants in this study engage with existential questions raised by the experience of living with multiple health conditions. Image-making allows for narrative experiments and a re-framing of what good care for people with multimorbidity would look like.

Paper long abstract:

People with (multiple) chronic conditions often find it hard to imagine the future. Chronic disease (self-)management is dominated by (pharmacological or behavioural) therapies that are focused on the present, leaving specific biographical etiologies unaccounted for. These approaches do not support people to sustain hopeful future imaginaries. Instead of being encouraged to strive for flourishing in a metaphysical sense, people spend most of their time and energy on maintaining a biological level of health. The ideal of cure, upheld in most biomedical settings, is unattainable for people with chronic conditions, which often leads to feelings of failure and guilt.

Based on photography workshops with people who have a combination of mental and physical long-term health conditions, I argue for the potential of image-based storytelling practices to draw out new, meaningful perspectives on depression and anxiety as “comorbidities” of physical chronic illness. Depression and anxiety are, in the context of multimorbidity, often framed as pathologies rather than emotional responses to the experience of long-term illness.

With the images created by participants in this study, I will argue that pathologising existential fears suppresses the social critique they could otherwise potentially fuel. The photography workshops are a space for participants to engage narratively with the emotional struggles that come with living with traumatic past events and uncertain futures. I will draw on the notion of “flourishing” to suggest a more sustainable form of care, emerging from participants’ image-based practices, that can better accommodate experiences of suffering.