Breathing life into a phenomenology of illness, part I

Havi Carel on understanding illness through its lived experience

Chapter 15 Invisible Suffering

This chapter presents a philosophical framework for the understanding of the experience of breathlessness. I suggest that the experience of breathlessness is total and overwhelming to the sufferer, but also largely invisible to the outsider. How does this tension play itself out for the respiratory patient? How does this tension affect respiratory medicine and clinical work? How could the first-person experience of breathlessness be better understood? Can it be usefully harnessed in the clinic? And what can a distinctively philosophical analysis offer this process? These questions are explored in the chapter, in the hope of providing a sketch of such a philosophical framework aimed at understanding this debilitating and common symptom. The structure of the chapter is as follows. It begins with an overview of breathing and the symptom of breathlessness, and how breathlessness is inter-preted in the clinic and outside it. The second section provides a phenomenological account of breathlessness, moving away from understanding it as a medical symptom to understanding it as a broader existential, social, personal, cultural, and psychological phenomenon. The final section examines how such a philosophical framework may be operationalized in a respiratory clinic, providing some examples of its possible clinical uses

Chapter 10 Breathlessness

This chapter uses a phenomenological approach to investigate the philosophical significance of a common yet debilitating experience: the experience of severe and pathological breathlessness. Using two key examples of breathlessness in the case of respiratory disease (somatic) and in anxiety disorders (considered as mental disorder) we show why a phenomenological approach to the study of these experiences is needed and how the distinction between the somatic and the mental comes under pressure when considering a complex phenomenon like breathlessness

Phenomenology and naturalism: Editors' introduction

Introduction to the special issue of the Journal Philosophy with the same titl