title: Chronotope disruption as a sensitizing concept for understanding chronic illness narratives.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  This article aims to elaborate chronotope disruption--a changed relation to time and space--as a sensitizing concept for understanding chronic illness narratives.
  
  
  METHODS
  Sixteen men and 16 women with Type 2 diabetes were purposefully sampled. Each was interviewed about his or her experience of diabetes self-management using the biographical-narrative interview method. Transcripts were inspected for key moments defined as emotionally laden stories relevant to the purpose of the research. We present dialogically inflected discursive analysis of exemplar extracts.
  
  
  RESULTS
  The analysis demonstrates how the concept of chronotope disruption helps identify, and understand, important aspects of patients' chronic illness narratives. First, we investigate how medical advice can conflict with embodied experience and how progressive bodily deterioration can provoke a reevaluation of past illness (self-mis)management. Second, the increasing temporal and spatial intrusion of chronic illness into participants' lives is examined. Finally, we focus on the masquerade of health as an attempt to manage, hide, or deny that one is physically challenged.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Chronotope disruption offers a useful sensitizing concept for approaching chronic illness narratives and around which to organize analytical insights and to develop practice. Chronotope analysis fills an important gap in the science through compensating current health sciences' focus on rationality, cognition, and prospective time (prediction) with a patient-oriented focus on emotionality, embodiment, and retrospective time (nostalgia). Chronotope disruption could be used to develop practice by gaining empathic understanding of patients' life-worlds and provides a tool to examine how new technologies change the way in which the chronically ill have "being" in the world.
authors.affiliation: School of Health & Related Research.
authors.forename: Tim
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Gomersall
authors.affiliation: Institute of Psychological Sciences, University of Leeds.
authors.forename: Anna
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Madill
mesh_terms: D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D002908:Chronic Disease; D002909:Chronobiology Phenomena; D003924:Diabetes Mellitus, Type 2 / Q000523:psychology* / Q000628:therapy; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D033262:Narration; D011446:Prospective Studies; D012189:Retrospective Studies; D012648:Self Care / Q000379:methods / Q000523:psychology*; D013997:Time Factors