Suffering, critical illness, and radical bodily doubt

How can we understand critical illness and suffering more generally? In this piece I offer three thoughts on this question. First, one’s relationship to one’s body is radically disrupted in illness in ways that are important to philosophically study and articulate (for example, using phenomenology). This can help reveal the realities of such extreme suffering. Second, understanding this disruption is crucial to our ability to understand and articulate illness experiences, both within and beyond healthcare contexts. Third, we ought to militate against a ‘bright-siding’ culture that shrinks the interpersonal spaces and communicative possibilities to speak of suffering, trauma, pain and illness. Both phenomenology as a method and the study of epistemic injustice in healthcare are significant ways of opening further spaces for such communicative efforts, that may jointly promote health justice, epistemic justice, and the ability to speak of what are currently largely unspeakable experiences.