The relationship between health and disease.

What is the relationship between the two? And, how can we think about this pair from the point of view of Psychology?

We talk a lot about health, and in modern society, many of the scientific advances tend to want to achieve states of "better health", delaying death, and warding off disease. 

But it's hard to talk about the disease. It is avoided or hidden. There are names of diseases that cause trembling, like Cancer, for example. And we want a state of absolute health, the further away we are and the less we think about it, the better.

The doctor Larry Dossey, in his article The light of health and the shadow of disease, talks about this pair of opposites and how modern societies seek to eradicate disease, claiming to preserve and observe only the health pole.

According to this author, with the health-disease pair, something very similar to what happens with life and death occurs. We pretend to ignore and deny death, with promises of immortality. We deny it and fear it equally. And in this way, we only make our relationship with her more complicated. Both: health and disease, are inevitable. There is no health without disease, and there is no life without death.

Reconciling ourselves with these "dark" aspects that we often pretend to ignore, is essential so that life can be lived in a relative state of health. Fearing illness and death prevents being able to live and enjoy health in an integral way. 

If we take this to the plane of Psychology, we can think in the same way, that to find a certain balance or learn to accept and recognize our own aspects, we have to investigate the dark and difficult aspects. The anguish, sadness, fear, and anxiety have to be able to be traveled to achieve a certain state of tranquility. If we do not connect with those aspects that we would often prefer to ignore, we cannot reach a state of greater awareness, security, or calm.

We cannot avoid illness to get to health. It is impossible to completely eradicate it from our lives, we have to learn to live with it, to whatever degree. Sometimes it will be present in different forms, in close people or in ourselves. The pandemic situation that we are going through today came to remind us with all its intensity. No matter how many scientific advances we achieve, there will always be a vanishing point. Uncertainty and finitude run through us and are an essential part of life.

As Dossey explains in his article, pre-modern cultures incorporated death and disease into their rituals, probably because they did not have the necessary scientific advances to "expel" it. However, recovering these rituals, or giving them a place of importance, is essential to be able to process them correctly. Going to funerals, or approaching a friend or acquaintance who is sick, can help us on that path of acceptance.

Health and illness are not so far from each other, they are both inseparable terms. In Dossey's words: "Illness can be considered something reasonable, something that can be treated, something that can be agreed upon." In order to experience health, we will have to learn to deal with the disease, to agree with it. By denying it, we only further dissociate our experience, further distancing ourselves from health.

 

Thank You