The Benefits of Pathologizing Your Pop Culture

When Pathologizing Pop Culture launched a little over a year ago, its premise was relatively straightforward: to use stories from film, television, literature, and art to explore the psychology of illness and healthcare. Over the past year, however, the column has evolved into something broader. Together, these essays have argued that stories do not simply reflect our experiences of illness and disability—they often reveal aspects of those experiences that medicine has not yet fully learned to name. We need a richer language for understanding what illness does to us, not just to our bodies. By illuminating the emotional, relational, and existential dimensions of health and healthcare, these narratives deepen our understanding of what it means to be a patient, support a loved one through illness, and care for others as healthcare professionals.

Medicine has become remarkably sophisticated at understanding disease. We can identify increasingly subtle pathophysiological changes, develop targeted therapies, and improve outcomes that would have seemed impossible only decades ago. Alongside these remarkable achievements lies another dimension of illness that is far more difficult to measure: the fear before a diagnosis, the uncertainty between appointments, the grief that accompanies the loss of one's former self, the moral distress of making impossible decisions, and the reconstruction of identity that often follows a life-changing medical event.

These experiences are not secondary to healthcare. They are healthcare. Over the past year, Pathologizing Pop Culture has become a way of examining these dimensions of illness through the lens of storytelling. By looking closely at the ways illness, disability, caregiving, and healing are portrayed in the stories that surround us, the column has helped illuminate recurring themes about the human experiences of healthcare. The following reflections represent the central ideas that have emerged from a year of exploring what stories can teach us about suffering, resilience, and what it means to care for one another.

Reflection 1: Medical Trauma Is Multifaceted, Relational, and Contextual

One of the clearest themes to emerge from a year of Pathologizing Pop Culture is that medical trauma is never just about what happens to the body. A diagnosis, procedure, or medical crisis may be the catalyst, but the experience of illness unfolds across multiple dimensions. What makes a medical event traumatic is shaped not only by what occurred, but also by how a person experiences and interprets what happened.

This theme appeared repeatedly throughout the stories explored this year. For Frida Kahlo, illness and chronic pain become inseparable from identity, creativity, and the way she made meaning of an altered relationship with her body. In The Yellow Wallpaper, the harm extends beyond symptoms to the experience of having one's own understanding of suffering dismissed within a medical system. And in Get Out, the relationship between health and power becomes central, illustrating how social context, identity, and systemic forces shape experiences of care or harm.

Reflection 2: Healing Does Not Mean Returning to What Was

Another theme that emerged is that healing is rarely a return to a previous version of oneself. Medical experiences often create a clear before and after, requiring patients, families, and communities to make meaning of what has changed.

Our healthcare system is often structured around a model of recovery that prioritizes restoration: symptoms resolve, function returns, and the body returns to its previous state. This framework is essential when cure or remission is possible, but it can unintentionally reinforce a hierarchy of recovery. When healing is defined primarily by symptom elimination, patients living with chronic or persistent symptoms may be left without a language for understanding what a meaningful life can look like alongside illness, like Simone in Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery.

The stories explored this year repeatedly challenged the assumption that healing means returning to baseline. In The Darjeeling Limited, healing did not come from reclaiming the person Francis was before injury, but from recognizing that returning to that version of himself was neither possible nor necessarily desirable. His journey required a willingness to let go of old identities, confront unresolved pain, and create something new from what remained. In Sound of Metal, Ruben's healing did not come from restoring the life he had before hearing loss, but from developing a new relationship with his body, his identity, and the possibility of meaning beyond what he lost. In How to Hold a Cockroach, suffering became an invitation to sit with uncertainty, vulnerability, and the fundamental questions of what it means to be human.

Reflection 3: Art Gives Language to Experiences Medicine Is Still Learning to Recognize

Perhaps the most enduring lesson from a year of Pathologizing Pop Culture is that art often gives language to experiences that healthcare has not yet fully integrated into its understanding of itself. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is an early example of this: a story that anticipated enduring questions about medical responsibility, the ethics of intervention, and the harms that can occur when scientific possibility outpaces consideration of human consequences. 

Throughout this year, many of the works explored in this column demonstrated how art can help people process, communicate, and make meaning from experiences that may otherwise remain difficult to articulate. In Perception Altered, artists living with changes in vision used creative expression to transform a disruptive medical experience into a new way of understanding themselves and the world. Similarly, In Tune with the Body explored how musicians use creativity to develop a different relationship with their bodies and make meaning from experiences that may not fit neatly within traditional medical narratives.

When we experience illness, injury, or disability, we are not simply recipients of medical care; we are meaning-makers, interpreting our experiences and integrating them into our understanding of ourselves and our lives. We create narratives about our bodies, our futures, and our identities as we encounter change, uncertainty, and vulnerability. Healthcare has developed extraordinary tools for diagnosing and treating disease, but caring for people requires understanding the full experience of being human. The humanities offer a language for experiences that can be difficult to capture through traditional clinical measures.

This has been the guiding purpose of Pathologizing Pop Culture: to bridge the gap between what the arts have long understood and what healthcare systems must acknowledge to provide truly human-centered care. The stories we watch, read, and listen to shape how we understand health, disability, suffering, and healing. By engaging critically with these narratives, clinicians can better understand the cultural frameworks through which we all make sense of our experiences.

This is also why creating space for us as healthcare professionals to engage with our own creativity matters. Our creativity is not simply a way to reclaim an identity outside of medicine; it is a way of strengthening medicine and surgical science itself. We are not separate from the human experiences we care for. We, too, encounter uncertainty, loss, illness, and transformation. Engaging with the arts allows us to remain curious, reflective, and connected to those human experiences at the center of our work. 

Inspired? Check out Hippocratic Collective’s Artist in Residence Program to support your own art making. 

Want to catch up on Pathologizing Pop Culture? Read the full column here.