Patient School as a Way of Creating Meaning in a Contested Illness: The Case of CFS

Abstract
Creating meaning in a situation of contested illness like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) is an interactive process. As an example of how meaning is created, a CFS patient school organized by a hospital clinic in Sweden is discussed. This school can be seen as both a school and a medically oriented activity. The presence of different frameworks provides an opportunity to use different perspectives to understand CFS. It makes it possible for the participating men and women to regard the illness both from the outside as a social object, from the inside through personal experiences and to put the diagnosis and suffering in a larger ‘sickness’ perspective. Consequently, a number of different interpretations are brought up and used to create meaning in a situation of illness. The patients/students are thus learning discursively to manage the illness at the same time as they examine different ways to interpret their experiences through this discursive activity.