Chronic Pain & Comic Representations

Many people live their lives with persistent pain – pain that is there for all or most of the time, pain that lasts from three months to a lifetime. Understanding how pain affects you and being able to explain this to health professionals, friends and family can make living with pain more tolerable. That’s easier said than done, which is why we need educational materials that go beyond books and leaflets. In this talk, Denis will discuss how stories and attention-grabbing illustrations can help individuals gain a greater understanding of their pain and explain it to others.

Can humour be harmful to health? Health professionals have become increasingly interested in the positive effects of humour on coping and wellbeing in patients. Coping has been viewed as passive and therefore not all forms of humour have been seen as beneficial. In particular, self-deprecating patient humour has been pathologised as problematic and seen as indicative of ‘underlying psychological problems’. Recent research suggests that ‘coping’ is far from passive and can involve using humour to challenge the impacts of illness.