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Transcultural Psychiatry
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Environmental Sensitivity: Equivocal Illness in the Context of Place

Christopher M. Fletcher

University of Alberta

This article presents a phenomenologically oriented description of the interaction of illness experience, social context, and place. This is used to explore an outbreak of environmental sensitivities in Nova Scotia, Canada. Environmental Sensitivity (ES) is a popular designation for bodily reactions to mundane environmental stimuli that are insignificant for most people. Mainstream medicine cannot support the popular models of this disease process and consequently illness experience is subject to ambiguity and contestation. As an ‘equivocal illness’, ES generates considerable social action around the nature, meaning and validity of suffering. Sense of place plays an important role in this process. In this case, the meanings that accrue to illness experience and that produce salient popular disease etiology are grounded in the experience and social construction of the Nova Scotian landscape over time. Shifting representations of place are reflected in illness experience and the meanings that arise around illness are emplaced in landscape.

Key Words: environmental sensitivity • illness experience • medically unexplained illness • Nova Scotia • phenomenology • sense of place

Transcultural Psychiatry, Vol. 43, No. 1, 86-105 (2006)
DOI: 10.1177/1363461506061759
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