Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health,Illness and Medicine

The journal Health has published interdisciplinary scholarship on the social dimensions of health and illness since 1997. Despite rich thematic syntheses at milestone anniversaries, no study has systematically examined how research designs, data collection techniques, and analytic frameworks have evolved to shape the journal’s empirical output. This critical scoping review maps the evolution of methodological ecosystems in the journal Health’s empirical articles from 1997 to 2025, examining which research traditions have structured the journal’s output, how these have changed over time, and how institutional pressures—particularly cross-sectional design bias—have shaped research temporality. A comprehensive search of the journal Health’s archives identified 692 empirical articles, which were coded in MAXQDA 2024 for research design, temporal orientation, data collection methods, analytical techniques, theoretical paradigm, and reporting clarity, and then clustered using code co-occurrence networks and modularity-based community detection to identify five methodological ecosystems. Five distinct ecosystems structure the journal’s research—quantitative positivism, qualitative interpretivism, ethnographic and observational inquiry, mixed-methods integration, and critical/discourse-oriented research—with cross-sectional designs dominating 78% of studies across all traditions, likely reflecting funding cycles, publication timelines, and career pressures rather than paradigmatic commitments. Over three decades, quantitative positivism declined from over half of published output in the late 1990s to under one quarter by 2025, while qualitative, ethnographic, mixed-methods, and critical approaches collectively increased from 17% to 46%, with notable inflection points including a qualitative “breakthrough” around 2012, an ethnographic resurgence after 2020, and methodological convergence across all ecosystems by 2023. The analysis theorizes these patterns as expressions of institutional cross-sectionalism, whereby structural constraints compress temporal depth even in paradigms that value process, and argues that advancing interdisciplinary health scholarship requires structural reforms in funding, publication policy, career evaluation, and methodological infrastructure to support longitudinal, immersive, and participatory inquiry.

Contrary to the argument that biological conceptualisations of mental distress serve as a smokescreen for the ills of capitalism in Western neoliberal societies, the findings show that the biological and individualised definitions of depression were present in the socialist Eastern Bloc. Taking the history of Polish psychiatry as a vantage point, this study introduces its historical development throughout late socialism and into the capitalist regime, revealing the continuity of biological conceptualisations of depression over time. It draws from archival research of the Polish Psychiatry journal, supplemented by interviews with psychiatrists from different generations. The study complicates the history of the European psychiatry during the Cold War period, by tracking knowledge transfers between East and West. It proves that the understanding of depression in late socialist Poland as an endogenous disease, an organic disorder independent of the social environment, was partly shaped by the Pavlovian paradigm and partly by Western neurobiological discoveries. Since the 1990s, with the dominance of American science, conceptualisations of depression as an endogenous disease have prevailed, albeit under a new wording of biological vulnerability. The study argues that the simultaneous impact of the Soviet and Western psychiatry in late socialist Poland was an instance of dual dependency resulting from the country’s geopolitical positioning. With the systemic transformation in the 1990s, a shift in the dependency pattern occurred, as Polish psychiatry clearly oriented towards the U.S. science.

This research presents a multimodal analysis of 189 infertility GIFs collected from the subreddit r/trollingforababy over a 12-month period. Drawing on symbolic interactionism and Bakhtinian concepts, the analysis examines how users repurpose popular culture imagery to narrate infertility struggles on digital platforms. Three major themes emerged: temporal disjuncture and the symbolic weight of waiting, dialogic resistance and carnivalesque inversion of infertility social scripts, and the grotesque medicalized body and the politics of visibility. Across the three themes, GIFs emerge as symbolic performances that enable users to negotiate stigma, build collective meaning, and resist dominant reproductive ideologies, positioning infertility as not only a medical and social condition but also a communicative site where meaning, identity, and agency are contested.

The prevalence of mental health challenges, such as anxiety and depression, highlights the need for accessible and practical methods to enhance wellbeing as a preventative measure. Over half of the global population (54%) owns a smartphone, and the number of mobile users worldwide was projected to reach 7.49 billion by 2025. With smartphone cameras widely available, individuals can easily document daily moments, potentially benefitting their emotional wellbeing. This qualitative study explored the impact of photo-taking on individual wellbeing through a 3-week intervention grounded in positive psychology principles. Nineteen participants, recruited via social media took a daily photo for 3 weeks, each based on a theme set by the researcher: something they were grateful for (week 1), a selfie or self-portrait highlighting positive traits (week 2) and a picture to share with someone else (week 3). Participants then engaged in online one-on-one interviews with the researcher. Reflexive thematic analysis identified four core themes: (1) appreciation of life’s value, (2) shifts in mindset, (3) cultivation of purpose and (4) pursuit of positivity. The findings suggest that this intervention contributes to fostering a positive outlook and enhancing feelings of happiness, contributing to participants’ emotional wellbeing. While the study demonstrates a promising link between photo-taking and wellbeing as an accessible and preventative tool, further research is needed to examine additional variables, particularly across diverse age groups and ethnicities. As technology becomes increasingly integrated into daily life, such methods hold the potential for promoting individual and community flourishing with minimal effort.

The proliferation of algorithmic classification systems in healthcare raises fundamental questions about medical normativity: who determines the standards of health, and through what mechanisms are those standards constructed and enforced? This paper makes three original contributions. First, it conceptualizes algorithmic normativity as a multidimensional phenomenon operating through training data selection, loss function design, and clinical deployment contexts. Second, it forges a novel analytical link between population-level structural inequity and the undertheorised phenomenological dimension of diagnostic identity fragmentation. Third, it proposes a human-centric governance framework integrating transparency, plural normativities, and meaningful patient participation as a coherent alternative to purely technical approaches to algorithmic fairness. Drawing on medical sociology, science and technology studies, and bioethics, I argue that algorithmic systems do not simply discover pre-existing medical truths but actively construct normative frameworks that reflect and reproduce social inequities embedded in their development. The question of who decides what is healthy cannot be answered through computational means alone but requires sustained democratic engagement with the ethical, social, and political dimensions of algorithmic medicine.

De/Medicalisation has become a staple of medical sociology to make sense of social issues at the intersection of health and illness. Broadly understood as the processes through which issues assume qualities that locate them within or beyond the remit of medicine, de/medicalisation continues to inform theoretical innovation and empirical research. The emergence of law clinics for people experiencing housing instability and homelessness offers a case study of how de/medicalisation can enrich the analysis of problems at the interstices of health and social care. Law clinics, often co-located or attached to primary and tertiary health care settings, aim to augment housing, health, wellness and social care offerings. Yet, this proximity – conceptual and spatial – may inadvertently reify understandings of homelessness as an individual pathology while aiming to offer pragmatic support to people who are otherwise excluded from core institutions in society. We present findings from a Roundtable with participants from law, social and health care professions and interviews with people experiencing housing instability (n = 27), lawyers, GPs and social workers (n = 10) in an Australian urban centre. In the vexed dynamics of the law clinic in-between different professions, de/medicalisation emerges as boundary-making and boundary-crossing to negotiate responsibilities, classify problems and reconcile competing logics.

In this article, we critically discuss a Swedish hospital foodservice reform by putting foodservice in a historical and social context and analyzing a case, “the most flexible patient foodservice system in Sweden,” by using Bacchi’s what’s the problem represented to be (WPR) approach. We show how hospital foodservice governance in Sweden has become more focused on the individual patient as a consumer. Our analysis points out how in political protocols and related policy materials freedom of choice, flexibility, and efficiency were articulated as drivers of change. Freedom of choice was argued to enhance quality, increase food intake, diminish demand for special diets and lower costs. This can be seen as empowering patients, but also shifting part of the responsibility of nutrition care and health over to individuals, whether they want it or not. Flexibility was seen as beneficial for patient logistics regarding medical treatment and argued to improve allocation of staff resources. Inefficiency was a characteristic attributed to the old system, while the reform was an opportunity to modernize and be more cost-efficient. The new organizational structures may lead to tensions between foodservice and healthcare. The changes, system flexibility and patient freedom of choice, are salient within a broader neoliberal discourse.

This article examines the sociomaterial inequalities encountered by young adults experiencing distress at the micro level with a focus on how various forms of material deprivation become embedded within recovery assemblages. Drawing on the Deleuzian–Guattarian new materialist approach, we define assemblages as human and nonhuman networks that connect material and immaterial elements together. In these assemblages, matter is considered to have ‘agentic’ capacity, and thus, agency is attributed, in addition to human actors, to nonhuman elements. By using interview data, our analysis identifies three distinct recovery assemblages arising from different forms of material deprivation in the recovery processes of young adults. The first assemblage relates to a lack of safe recovery environments, the second involves insufficient financial resources, and the third reflects the loss of bodily strength and diminished capacity for everyday functioning. Assemblages marked by material deprivation can become relatively permanent and territorialized, limiting the agency of young adults experiencing distress. However, these assemblages are also subject to destabilization and deterritorialization through micropolitical actions. We demonstrate how young adults and their family members can disrupt these assemblages and influence material deprivation. According to the new materialist perspective, small acts can ignite significant change, offering the potential to challenge sociomaterial inequalities on a broader scale.

Anti-stigma efforts with the goal of increasing treatment are often prioritized over anti-stigma efforts with the goal of improving the sociocultural status of a stigmatized way of being. We argue that a similar phenomenon exists within basic stigma research: research that enables efforts to increase rates of diagnosis and treatment has been prioritized over research that enables efforts to destigmatize. We refer to this as the medicalization of basic stigma research. In this critical review, we show that the medicalized state of stigma research manifests in several ways: the medicalized impetus and justification for much stigma research, the medicalized focus on the consequences of stigma, and the continued influence of attribution theory despite its empirical and practical limitations. We argue that researchers, reviewers, and funders should work to demedicalize stigma research, highlighting three potential steps. First, we must distinguish between improving the sociocultural valuation of a stigmatized way of being (destigmatization) and increasing the extent to which a way of being is defined and treated as a medical problem (medicalization). Second, we must prioritize research into what causes the sociocultural devaluation of stigmatized ways of being. Third, we must develop new theories of stigma that decenter health and illness and instead center cultural processes of devaluation.

This paper conducts a multimodal critical discourse analysis of 92 accompanying images in 22 articles related to adolescent depression published on the WeChat official accounts of major Chinese state-aligned media outlets, including People’s Daily, CCTV.com, China News Service, and Health News. We pay special attention to analyze the multimodal discursive strategies employed to represent the causes and solutions of adolescent depression, as well as the implicit health ideologies embedded within these representations. Findings indicate that different gazes and hands are discursively represented as causes and solutions for adolescent depression. Specifically, a blaming gaze and judgmental hands visually construct the perceived origins of depression, while a mothering gaze and caring hands are deployed to depict pathways to recovery. In particular, the state media predominantly attribute the causes of depression to familial and socio-cultural factors—such as academic pressure and “face” culture—through discursive strategies including cool color palettes, spatial marginalization of adolescents, and metaphorical constructs like dominant parental figures, surveilling eyes, and encircling social judgments. In contrast, solutions are frequently visualized through warm tones, intimate compositions, and metaphors such as “healing hugs from mothers,” emphasizing familial emotional support while underrepresenting professional medical intervention. We argue that these discourses may reinforce familial-centric ideologies and conventional gender norms of mothers. Implications for more sensitive and constructive media discourses on adolescent depression in the Chinese context are discussed.

Narratives play a crucial role in shaping individual and collective identities, also in the context of illness. This study explored the experiences of individuals with advanced cancer who participated in a narrative course at a Danish research clinic in 2022. This course included a collective storytelling exercise where participants shared personal illness narratives that eventually were integrated into a collective story document. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork including participant observations, individual interviews, focus groups, and the collective story documents, this study explores two key research questions: What do collective stories reveal about participants’ experiences of living with advanced cancer? How do participants experience the process and significance of creating collective stories, both within the course setting and beyond? The findings reveal that the collective stories predominantly centered on themes of suffering and loss, including physical, emotional, and social challenges. Sharing and listening to these stories in common fostered a sense of community among participants, alleviating feelings of loneliness and validating their experiences. However, attempts to share the collective stories outside the course setting often proved challenging, highlighting the unique role of the course as a supportive “local moral world.”

The study underscores the potential of collective storytelling in rehabilitation and palliative care, while emphasizing the influence of broader cultural and social narratives on illness experiences.

Contemporary health research often examines patient objectification, patient self-objectification, and good patient performance as separate concerns. Treating them in isolation makes it difficult to see how they combine to shape what patients feel able to express in clinical encounters. To address this gap, this study examines how cancer survivors describe objectification, internalization, and performance within oncology care. Through this analysis, we develop a unified analytic account of these three experiences. In doing so, we reframe the “medical gaze” in existential terms as the “medical look,” by drawing on Sartre’s account of how becoming visible to another reshapes lived experience and existence. We interpret clinical visibility as a structure that unfolds across encounters, rather than as isolated interactional events. Drawing on 29 interviews with cancer survivors, our findings show that being positioned through clinical routines, adopting those framings as self-measures, and calibrating self-presentation in anticipation of clinical judgment were lived as connected movements within one structure of visibility. Recognizing this continuity clarifies communication pressures and constrained agency in oncology, and identifies points where clinical practice may ease the conditions under which patients manage how they appear.

Despite being unrelated to feminized organs or bodily processes, the contested condition called fibromyalgia is said to be overwhelmingly feminized and diagnosed predominantly in (assumed-) women. Few social scientific studies have explored the reasons or pathways for fibromyalgia’s genderedness. In this article, I analyze medical scholarship on fibromyalgia over five decades to trace how it is gendered in this body of knowledge and how this genderedness is negotiated. I show that the genderedness of fibromyalgia is enacted multiply through the construction of fibromyalgia patient archetypes, through the reinscription and repudiation of clinical axioms in research design, and the elucidation of diagnostic criteria.

Suicidal ideation is highly dynamic and can rapidly escalate to suicide attempts. Traditional clinical assessment tools rely on retrospective, one-off evaluations, limiting their effectiveness in timely intervention and individual prevention. Digital technologies offer promising alternatives by enabling real-time, context-sensitive assessments and interventions. In response to this potential, a multidisciplinary French team developed EMMA—a smartphone application designed to assess and help prevent suicide directly from an individual’s pocket, as part of a clinical trial. Drawing on new materialist and sociomaterial perspectives, this study aims to explore how the use of EMMA reconfigures relationships and practices within the emerging paradigm of digital suicide prevention. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with individuals experiencing severe suicidal ideation, all of whom participated in the clinical trial and used EMMA over a 6-month period. The goal was to capture their subjective experiences and engagement with the digital tool. Participants initially engaged with EMMA as a source of support during a vulnerable post-hospitalization period, perceiving it as an extension of care. Use was most intense in the early weeks, then declined as their condition improved. While EMMA enabled self-reflection and awareness of emotional patterns, it also elicited ambivalent responses—some found it comforting, others intrusive or overwhelming. The app reshaped connections not only to the self but also to relatives and the healthcare system, acting as a relational interface within a broader network of care. Overall, the findings suggest that using EMMA involved forms of digital intimacy within a sociotechnical assemblage, engaging in a complex feedback loop involving the tool, themselves, their relatives, and the healthcare system. This study highlights that innovation in suicide prevention does not reside solely in technological design, but emerges through socio-material practices and the ways digital tools become entangled with lived experience and care relationships.

Individuals from marginalised backgrounds are often “placed” in spatial planes marked by disadvantages and poor resource availability, impacting their health outcomes. This study explored the role of spatiality in shaping health outcomes, with scrub typhus–a neglected tropical disease (NTD) of zoonotic origin–as an illustrative case. Employing a spatial justice framework, the study investigated the intersection of geospatial and socio-spatial factors influencing health and illness experience in Puducherry, India. An interdisciplinary mixed-methods approach was employed, involving geospatial hotspot mapping of 256 individuals who were diagnosed with scrub typhus over a period of 12 months, vector studies in the hotspots and a go-along ethnography with participants selected from the hotspots. Quantitative findings revealed a higher incidence during cooler months and post-rainfall among households proximate to vegetation and agricultural land, and the vector studies confirmed the presence of mite vectors in these areas, reinforcing the geospatial links to vulnerability. Qualitative findings highlighted how socio-spatial factors like housing conditions, decaying infrastructure, systemic neglect, poor patient education, and mobility create disproportionate vulnerability to the marginalised. The study underscores the importance of addressing the spatiality of health in its geo-spatial and socio-spatial dimensions to reduce the disease burden and the need for spatially informed public health interventions to address NTDs.

Scleroderma is a rare chronic multi-system disease characterised by fibrotic changes in the skin, connective tissues and internal organs. The high mortality rate associated with the condition means that clinical attention is often focussed exclusively in these contexts. This paper reports on a mixed methods study which explored patients’ and practitioners’ experiences of the oral and dental manifestations of scleroderma – other aspects of the condition that, patients state, also have life-changing, and limiting, effects. The overarching research questions underpinning the study were, what are patients’ and practitioners’ experiences of scleroderma-related dental problems and what strategies can be developed to improve patients’ quality of life? Here we focus exclusively on patients, who reported a significant disjuncture between their own experiences and professionals’ understanding and intervention, such that their scleroderma related oral and dental problems were perceived to be clinically ignored and/or trivialised. This evident mismatch generates a range of keenly felt absences wherein the patient, the mouth, and the oral cavity more broadly, can be seen to both literally, and metaphorically, dis/dysappear. We draw on a range of theoretical and empirical perspectives to recognise the complex interplay of priorities and expectations that play out between patient and practitioner, concluding that far greater clinical attention should be afforded to the patient’s own account of their condition whether or not this fully aligns with practitioners’ perspectives. Scleroderma affects in excess of 2.5 million people globally, but the issues we explore here have a resonance far beyond this one rare condition. A range of other auto-immune and chronic conditions, such as type 1 diabetes and rheumatoid arthritis, also prominently feature oral and dental problems and, as such, this work has the potential to help shape the treatment and understanding of the illness experiences of significant numbers of people.

Written information exchange is widely used to share information and coordinate care across services. Yet, its coordinating effects remain unclear. The aim of the study was to explore the textually mediated practices through which institutional work was coordinated between social care and healthcare professionals in Danish intersectoral care pathways. We analysed seven Health Statuses, each consisting of a request (LÆ 121) from social care and a reply (LÆ 125) from a general practitioner. These were collected from seven textually mediated pathways of people with disadvantage and examined through an institutional ethnographic text analysis of their textual characteristics and discursive practices. We found that the practices were directly influenced by detailed policy texts. The textually mediated accounts of the client/patients’ situation were brief, highly structured by macro policy documents, and drew on two distinctly different discourses, health and social care respectively. These practices did not support intersectoral coordination and warrant scrutiny of intended and unintended consequences.

Parks offer opportunities for adolescent girls to be physically active, yet many are excluded from these spaces, particularly those who are affected by intersecting inequalities. This paper draws from six focus groups with 33 adolescent girls in Bradford, United Kingdom, to explore the relationship between their sense of belonging in their local parks and their engagement with physical activity (PA) in these spaces. Drawing on Yuval-Davis’ sociological understanding of citizenship, we highlight local parks as a symbol of belonging to their local communities, and ‘walk and talk’ as a form of local park-based PA practice that also enhances their sense of belonging (citizenship) to their local communities while also reducing stress. Male domination of local parks is perceived as a barrier to use these spaces for PA, which is also influenced by high level deprivation. As a response, many develop experiential knowledge and strategies that demonstrate their local active citizenship. Moving forward, we call for a combined strategy to leverage local parks for adolescent girls affected by intersecting inequalities to do PA: first, a better park and city design that is attuned to their walking experiences and safety, and; second, re-investment in youth organisations to support their development of citizenship competencies through local park-based PA interventions.

This study investigates the interplay between biomedical practices and sociocultural constructs of gender and masculinity in shaping healthcare professionals’ (HCPs) understandings of myocardial infarction (MI) and MI patients. Theoretically, the study departed from the ongoing reframing of healthcare in Sweden and internationally, whereby the medical gaze is transformed into biomedicalization. The findings show that the dominance of biomedical perspectives serves to create certain norms regarding how bodies and illness are to be treated, bringing a strong focus to person-centered care, and to patients’ own moral responsibility to adhere to medical advice. The expansion of individualized perspectives – the construction of “biological citizens” – however, also entails a risk of creating a false sense of universality, whereby social and cultural aspects of illness are made invisible. Even though some HCPs describe MI as a “male disease,” patients are largely constructed as gender-neutral. The dominance of biomedicalization serves to obscure opportunities to think through the connections between risk factors, gender/masculinity, and MI. Accordingly, the healthcare system and HCPs working in MI care may fail to account for how diverse gender scripts and cultural dynamics might contribute to form patients’ experiences, care seeking behavior and adherence with medical advice in rehabilitation.