Perceptions of death, belief systems and the process of coping with chronic pain

Joseph A. Kotarba

Social Science & Medicine, 1983, vol. 17, issue 10, 681-689

Abstract: Chronic pain is an on-going experience of embodied discomfort, quite often associated with neuromuscular pathologies, which fails either to heal naturally or to respond to normal medical intervention. The process of coping with chronic pain most commonly involves both the search for medical or non-medical cure, and the search for meaning for intractable suffering. In this paper, I survey various religious, philosophical and mystical belief systems and their empirical use as resources for meaning. The great variability in the ways ideas of death, the key elements extracted from belief systems during the process of coping, are used reflects the variable success in normalizing chronic pain. Theoretically, this paper adds an important dimension to the concept of the chronic illness trajectory, namely, the issue of inevitability, and discusses clinical and non-clinical aspects of depression among people with chronic pain.

Date: 1983
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