From patient to agent: collective practices and identity work in an emotional community

The diagnosis of serious illness creates a fissure from the known self. How do individuals cope with their new role as patients and how could healthcare services better-serve the ill? "Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place." (Sontag 2002: 3)