Abstract
In this study the aim was to explore how persons with chronic skeletal pain describe pain and suffering experiences along a storyline from their past life, during the illness and the future perspective of the illness. The study was inspired by narrative ethnographical approaches to health and illness. The data derive from nine-month observations at four pain clinics in Bukan, Iran, followed by qualitative, narrative interviews with 20 Kurdish men and women who suffer from chronic skeletal pain. A narrative analysis was undertaken to understand the complexity of the stories about pain and suffering and on this basis identified a storyline based on three sub-narratives: 1) beyond illness (past); 2) living in pain (now); 3) the shadow of death (future). The findings highlight the participants’ different understandings and meanings of pain and suffering and the ways in which link past, present and future. The pain, when sustained, becomes part of the patients’ lives. It creates a kind of suffering that takes the sufferer beyond the pain in a way that it affects the prospects of the future life of them. In this condition the patient is only waiting for death.
Author ORCID Identifier
0000-0001-6213-2322
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Recommended Citation
Shamsi, Loghman (2026) "From Pain to Suffering: The Narrative Ethnography of Pain Experience Among Kurdish People with Chronic Skeletal Pain in Iran," Health Behavior Research: Vol. 9: No. 1.
