'Health for me': a sociocultural analysis of healthism in the middle classes

Abstract

In this paper, we address what many health professionals see as a common, increasingly uncontainable and personally stressful problem: the beliefs, behaviour and expectations of the articulate, health-aware and information-rich middle-classes. We describe some fictitious case scenarios, which reflect real-life problems that we have encountered in clinical situations as a general practitioner (Greenhalgh) and psychiatrist (Wessely). The scenarios were constructed using a technique called ‘critical fiction’, in which themes from real cases are systematically extracted and fictionalized into new stories¹. They are deliberately somewhat stereotypical, and we acknowledge that the perceptions and choices of any individual will not be determined solely (or even predominantly) by the various socio-cultural phenomena explored in this chapter. Nevertheless, these cases serve to illustrate our analysis of the origins and nature of the ‘health for me’ phenomenon.