Another word-bone to pick
Pain is inevitable; suffering is optional.- Unknown
Anita, a reader of this blog, recently asked me what I think of the term "suffer" – as in "the woman ‘suffered a stroke’, the person ‘suffers from schizophrenia’ .…" My short answer is that we should be careful about assigning "intensity" descriptions to another person’s experience based on how we think we’d react to or interpret the situation. We could end up making things worse for a person trying to tap into his/her resilience to maintain hope and optimism.
As the introductory quote suggests, "suffering" is perception rather than fact. So why assume a perception that something is worse than it might actually be if left to the individual to process as his/her unique experience? I believe "suffering" feeds into (as well as on) the medical model’s idea that everything presented to the practitioner needs to be fixed.
The concept of suffering is somewhat slippery, I think. For one thing, although "suffer" has negative connotations, it’s not always "thoroughly bad." For example, some people might achieve some sort of secondary gain from identifying their experience as "suffering" – or eliciting that assumption from others. Other people might have religious, spiritual or even "practical" beliefs that view "suffering" as necessary to achieve positive things.
I came across a discussion in a Facebook group1 of the question "is suffering necessary to produce good art?" One respondent wrote,
"Suffering is only necessary if you want to play into the unfortunate stereotype that the general public believes. Claude Monet's idea of suffering was to shut himself in a room with a good supply of fine wine, and wait until the weather cleared up again, so he could wander his estate and paint. I guess that this isn't so tragic."2
Remember what I said earlier about whether suffering for secondary gain is really "suffering?" If that statement about Monet is accurate, there you have an example of what I mean.
Projecting one’s idea of suffering onto the "sufferer" can lead us astray:
…a woman with quadriplegia said, "I learned that I could have the same joy for painting with a mouth stick that I had taken for granted with the use of my hands. I paint to express my love of nature and its many splendid creatures"3
Whatever challenges that woman experiences as a result of her quadriplegia, it doesn’t sound to me like she "suffers from" it.
So, one person’s "suffering" is another’s "transition". I’ll admit I’m cynical when I hear someone talking about how a horrifying experience turned out to be a blessing. I hope it’s true, and not just their whistling past the graveyard. But really: who is anyone to label another’s experience any more than "factually": "surviving" a life-threatening event, or "living with" challenges? Yeah, I know: we can argue forever about what constitutes "living" vs. "just not dead yet;" but that’s the whole point: quality of life isn’t imposed or granted; it’s subjectively achieved. Your idea of heaven could be my idea of hell. The most we can do as OT practitioners is help individuals find the paths that lead away from their hells.
1 Facebook Group "Art" (Admin.: Matt Merhar)
2 Barry Monohon, posted May 18, 2009 to Facebook Group "Art" Discussion
3 Cited in Yerxa, E. J. (2009). The infinite distance between the I and the it. American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 63, 490–497.