Healing in the Absence of a Cure

Abstract

This article offers a series of 3 vignettes exploring how art making has enabled me to understand my experience of the psychological and spiritual questions that have arisen throughout my diagnosis and subsequent treatment of multiple sclerosis (MS) in the private hospital system in Australia. The findings of the article indicate that the challenge to maintain a sense of identity that is separate to the experience of illness is critical for people who are living with MS and the language employed by health-care workers has a profound capacity to help or hinder this. Opportunities to make art in hospital supports the efficacy of prescribed medical treatments by enabling patients to exercise power in the midst of a process over which they have little or no control.