Journeys through illness: suffering and resilience

This chapter:
•  explores the notion of living with chronic illness as a journey;
•  explores the concepts of enduring and uncertainity as aspects of the
   suffering associated with living with chronic illness;
•  defines resilience
•  explores the ways in which people develop and use resilient strategies
    in the face of chronic illness;
•  describes survivorship as an outcome of resilience; and
•  discusses the role of nurses and other caring professionals in relation to
    supporting a person through their suffering, and to develop their resilience
    in the face of that suffering.

Still suffering from the `silo effect`: lingering cultural barriers to collaborative care

This research project sought to draw out the contesting definitions of collaborative care among professional subgroups in maternity services. The paper contrasts medical and social models of knowledge and reports on qualitative evidence from midwives and doctors in Australian hospitals. The evidence indicates that collaborative care is welcomed by both midwives and doctors but that there remains a lingering residue of the ‘silo effect’ of the ‘old’ professionalism, characterized by hierarchical relations, divergent philosophies and competing domains. Although a ‘new professionalism’ has emerged that challenges the old hierarchies and professional dependencies, it too harbours lingering residues of the former dichotomy between midwives and obstetricians. These tensions and enmities will need to be resolved before genuine collaboration may take full effect. The objective is a relationship focused model of care that transcends professional or woman-focused models. The ‘new’ professionalism may be expedited through mediation strategies, a version of which is the ‘sociological intervention method’ discussed in this article.

Damages for pain and suffering in tort law

Legislation enacted between 2002 and 2005 by each Australian State and Territory reformed and partially codified the common law of personal injuries. This column examines the nature and history of damages for pain and suffering and analyses the approach taken by different Australian jurisdictions to compensation for non-economic loss. Non-economic loss is generally composed of pain and suffering, loss of amenities of life, and loss of enjoyment of life (some jurisdictions, eg New South Wales, also include disfigurement, and loss of expectation of life). Several jurisdictions have imposed thresholds that a claimant must meet as a prerequisite to suing for damages at common law.

"Appear as crucified for me" : sight, suffering, and spiritual transformation in the hymns of Charles Wesley

Early Methodist laypeople often described their conversion experiences in terms of seeing the suffering of Christ. This article considers this theme within early Methodist culture by examining the relationship between sight, suffering, and spiritual transformation in the hymns of Charles Wesley. Many of Wesley's hymns depict the suffering of Christ in evocative detail, encouraging the singer or reader to imagine and respond to this suffering in particular ways. I argue that Wesley presents the sight of Christ's suffering as having profound transformative power, at the heart of Christian experience. In doing so he constructs Methodist spirituality in a way that draws upon both the ancient Christian tradition of Passion devotion and contemporary eighteenth-century convictions about the power of the sight of suffering.

'The suffering members sympathise' : constructing the sympathetic self in the hymns of Charles Wesley

For the first time in history, this timely landmark volume brings together contributions from the leading scholars working on the life and work of Charles Wesley.

Dossier Chris Marker : the suffering image

Dossier Chris Marker: The Suffering Image is a study of a late-modern chiasmus, impersonal-personal agency, as it comes to expression in the works of French artist and filmmaker, Chris Marker, as the dynamic interplay of political and subjective agency. As chiasmus, the complementary halves of this often-apocalyptic dynamis (a semi-catastrophic, temporal or historical force-field) also – arguably – secretly agree to meet, through the work of art, in the futural. Consistent with the classical figure of concordia discors, these irreducible warring aspects of life experience are, in fact, resolved in an atemporal and ahistorical moment that inhabits the work of art from its inception. This redemptive aspect in art is also the ultimate gesture of the artwork as “mask” or “screen” for forces that reside beyond the frame of the image or work, as its proverbial Other, or within the frame, as other to that Other. A topological “knot,” or ontological “problem,” it is this very conflict that animates all of Marker’s extensive works – filmic and otherwise.