What Is a Chronic Illness?

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People living with chronic illness often personify their medical condition.

A negative personification of one's chronic illness derails adaptation and well-being.

Listening to how a client personifies their illness can help their therapist understand how they cope with it.

Some patients speak about illness as if it were a person.

“The lupus is angry today.”

“My pain is torturing me.”

“Today, the disease is letting me rest.”

Clinicians often treat these expressions as colorful metaphors. But psychological research suggests something deeper may be happening. For many people living with chronic illness, the illness gradually becomes a character in their psychological world. In other words, people begin to relate to their illness almost the way they relate to another person.

Psychologists call this phenomenon illness personification.

In a recent poem about lupus that will soon appear in On the Hill: Narrative Medicine, the illness appears not as a diagnosis but as a presence:

Neither a pet nor a threat,

this wolf, a guiding dog

through all her I-don’t-cares

and the city’s thinning fog.

The wolf in the poem is not merely a literary imagination. It reflects something........

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