Accounting for Dystonia: Personalising Illness Through Narrative

This paper explores how people living with dystonia, a chronic neurological
condition involving involuntary muscle spasms in multiple body parts, use
narrative to make sense of illness by linking past, present and future, and
giving their condition personal meaning (what Early calls the “customisation”
of illness) (Early, 1984). It draws on a life-history interview with Sarah, a
woman in her thirties living with generalised dystonia to show how people
integrate their condition into their lives, and looks more generally at how
narratives of causation are used to make sense of illness.