Sickness, Stigma and Spiritual Awakening

The author set out to explore a phenomenon she had observed amongst a cohort of women living with chronic «invisible», or contested, illnesses. These women appeared to possess a high degree of altruism, ecological awareness, compassion, and a particular quality of empathic presence. What she didn’t expect to find in their narratives were the accounts of harrowing trauma they endured in the medical battleground of contested illnesses. They described the humiliating effects of being dismissed as r