CHRONIC ILNESS AND HEALTH

Chronic Ilness and Health

Chronic Ilness and Health

A chronic illness is any medical condition that has a prolonged course and often interferes with physical and mental functioning. Chronic medical conditions may also be marked by periods of acute exacerbation that require more intensive medical attention. Examples of chronic illnesses include acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), asthma, cancer, cerebral palsy, congenital heart disease, cystic fibrosis, hemophilia, insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus, leukemia, sickle cell disease, and spina bifida (Suis, 2005).

Although chronic conditions can be life threatening, increases in medical knowledge and advances in technology have enabled many individuals with these medical disorders to live longer and lead productive lives. The presence of a chronic medical condition affects not only the individual diagnosed with the disease but the person's entire family (Stanton, 2006). Because chronic illnesses are not curable, continual medical management and adherence to treatment regimens are necessary. Frequently, it is necessary for family members and the individual to assume a great deal of responsibility for managing the illness (Revenson, 2008).

Understanding the relation between health and happiness naturally raises the question “What is happiness?” Happiness can mean several different things. It can refer to people's overall evaluation of their own lives, or it can refer to momentary feelings of pleasantness. Because of the multiplicity of meanings that happiness holds, researchers sometimes prefer to use the term subjective well-being, although happiness is sometimes used synonymously with health (Lorig, 2007). Life satisfaction is a global cognitive evaluation—how a person feels about his or her life as a whole—although there are specific domain satisfactions as well (e.g., satisfaction with one's marriage). Emotions, on the other hand, specifically reflect on-line evaluations of ongoing events by the affect system (Revenson, 2008). The combination of emotions and life satisfaction is called subjective well-being because it emphasizes the individual's own assessment of his or her own life—not the judgment of “experts.”

Some mood states, such as depression, are by definition part of low SWB and ill mental health. After all, depression entails having negative moods and a negative evaluation of one's life. However, mental health includes more than simply the absence of negative moods. Researchers have called for the inclusion of positive states in conceptions of mental well-being. In other words, to be mentally healthy means to have positive feelings as well as minimal negative feelings (Lorig, 2007). As expected, individuals with a mental illness such as schizophrenia, personality disorder, or depression tend to be less satisfied with their lives and experience greater and more intense negative emotion and less positive emotion than nonclinical populations (Suis, 2005).

Does mental illness cause a decrease in life satisfaction? For some mental illnesses, the link to SWB is definitional—that is, depression is virtually the same as having low SWB. For other mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, there may be more of a causal link in that having schizophrenia leads to lower pain. Even so, the causality is not necessarily direct because mental illness is often accompanied by poor social functioning and other problems ...