Imagine if the frame of caring for me was a bit more flexible to allow my doctor to prescribe a yoga regime or help me explore a mindfulness programme.
Imagine if clinicians incorporated Indigenous ways of knowing to LISTEN to pain (language, individual, share, teachable moments, engage and navigate).
Imagine if public health officials did not wait until chronic stress made the population prone to illness, and instead invested in happiness policies like those in the Netherlands, the country of Erasmus and Huizinga.
When knowledge and care are lacking (for example, for women with endometriosis), social media becomes a space for knowledge generation. In Coping With Illness Digitally, health and digital communications researcher Stephan Rains illustrates that people connect to communities that offer information and care through shared experiences.
The COVID-19 pandemic illustrated the capacity of social media to generate data about coping with stress. However, if we are to be governed by numbers, we need a playground where we are safe and not passively surveyed.
In a real playground, participants are not under surveillance but are engaged in generating knowledge about psychosocial stressors that make them ill. Platforms such as Patients Like Me provide a blueprint for adding our narratives of stress-generated illnesses and coping strategies.
Najmeh Khalili-Mahani is the Director of Media-Health/Game-Clinic laboratory at Concordia University. This commentary first appeared in The Conversation.
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