ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the newly emerging health humanities and the opportunities these afford for fresh explorations of patterns of language and culture, as well as novel examinations of the context and culture of health and illness through the medium of language. This is undertaken through several examples of the author’s own work. First, I explore how digital technologies have facilitated the curation and exploitation of accounts of illness and health, in fiction and in lived experience. Then I consider how we examined news coverage of mental health problems and recovery, using a large dataset of UK press discourse and examining this in terms of ‘voice’. This involves asking whose voices or perspectives are privileged in the discourse. UK local press coverage was replete with examples of mental health service users achieving some degree of recovery through arts-based activities. Third I reprise a now-classic study of messages written to an online agony aunt service on the former website teenagehealthfreak.org.uk. Analyses of large samples of these messages indicated a great deal of focus on reproductive health issues, as well as a substantial amount of material about self-injury and suicidality. All these are areas where young people are often unwilling to talk to representatives of the adult world and which represent a valuable resource for those who work with young people, as well as health or social care providers. While the digital humanities are often cast in a curatorial or archival role, the digital health humanities may also offer opportunities to re-think and re-pattern who we are as human beings. How we formulate and discuss distress, how we attempt to medicalise or de-medicalise aspects of the human condition, how we seek or assimilate expertise or submit to professional succour – all these can now be examined on a much larger canvas thanks to digital technologies.
