Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-18T06:22:41.786Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - ‘Pretend illness’: An analysis of how communication patterns can foster particular forms of complaints

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 September 2009

Get access

Summary

‘It is in what people pretend that true morality may be discovered.’

Bishop Butler quoted in Gillon (1985).

In order to show how physical complaints are established as part of the child's world of illness I will now proceed to link the observations I made in my study with research carried out into abdominal pain in childhood and somatisation disorder in adults. This will point to ways in which children develop special dialects for complaining, an understanding of which opens up a variety of new treatment approaches.

It has been seen that when children are growing up they have a wide range of views on illness and how it is caused. Their views change over the years in a sequence described as though conforming to the stages outlined by Piaget (Neuhauser et al., 1978; Carandang et al. 1979; Whitt et al., 1979), the stages being the same in hospitalised children (Simeonsson, Buckley & Monson, 1979). Piaget's approach had predominantly been an ego-psychology which did not stress the ecology of the developmental process. As we have seen it has been necessary to place more emphasis on the form of the relationships with the child, how questions are presented to the child (Donaldson, 1978; Samuel & Bryant, 1984) and how the child presents his questions (Tizard & Hughes, 1984). The questions asked must make sense to the child with his experience of the world and especially his relationships (Hobson, 1980, 1982).

Type
Chapter
Information
The Child's World of Illness
The Development of Health and Illness Behaviour
, pp. 175 - 200
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1988

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×