Editor's Column: Writing and Healing

On 14 April 1999, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published the results of a series of studies entitled "Effects of Writing about Stressful Experiences on Symptom Reduction in Patients with Asthma or Rheumatoid Arthritis." Researchers in these studies asked participants "to write for 20 minutes on 3 consecutive days a week....Participants in the experimental group (39 asthma, 32 RA) were assigned to write about the most stressful experience that they had ever undergone, while the participants in the control group were asked to describe their plans for the day." ¹ Participants in the experimental group experienced clinically significant improvements in symptom reduction over a four-month period. The authors concluded, "This is the first study to demonstrate that writing about stressful life experiences improves physician ratings of disease severity and objective indices of disease severity in chronically ill patients" (emphasis mine). ²

Although the hypothesis that writing about stressful experience directly, positively, and significantly affects the current and future health of those who write has been tested through extensive studies conducted by researchers around the world, one of the most significant effects of the JAMA article has been to make the relationship between writing and healing important enough for contemporary medicine to notice. ³

And notice it has.

In an editorial under the title "Writing as Therapy: Effects on Immune Mediated Illness Need Substantiation in Independent Studies," published in the British Medical Journal, Trisha Greenhalgh writes,

It seems frankly implausible that a total of 60 minutes' writing on a subject unrelated to the disease should have a clinically significant impact on two different chronic diseases four months later....

But perhaps my interpretation is biased by my own cultural prejudices. I have an instinctive empathy with Bolton's approach to writing therapy as an art rather than a science and a personal distaste for quick fix interventions that smack of pop psychology and have been marketed to the public through the same channels as Billy Graham and the F Plan diet. If others in the UK share this cynicism our scientific community is probably the ideal ground to attempt to replicate Smyth et al's study in an uncontaminated population. ⁴

In her comment, Greenhalgh reveals an important and dominant instance of the divide between the seen and unseen that Judy Schaefer probes in the poem with which this issue of Literature and Medicine opens. Greenhalgh's words reveal also the everyday consequences of that division: the separation of true science from pop quackery; the casual use of violent and dismissive discourse; the elevation of prejudice and cynicism to sufficient cause for a national research agenda.

The contributors to this volume approach the subject of writing and healing in a significantly different way. They favor a more cooperative view of the relationship between word and symptom, between what can be seen and what cannot, a relationship that mobilizes both the science of medicine and the resources of language, myth, and narrative in the service of health and healing. Contributors' lives, work, and writing occupy the space between Greenhalgh's simple binaries of science and art, cynicism and gullibility, where they complicate such easy separations.

Healing, as the writers in this volume understand it, encompasses both physical wellness and dynamic, socially driven symbolic processes that enable sufferers to make sense of traumatic or difficult experience, to integrate that experience into the ongoing narratives within which they live their lives, and to move on with those lives. The sufferer is enabled to overcome limitations of past and present illness and trauma through the disciplined invention of language, which helps the sufferer create a more flexible, less restricted relationship with past, present, and future. To be healed thus, in Richard Selzer's words, is to be "retrieved from the shadows and set down once more upon the bright lip of...life." ⁵ The ancient Greeks would have called such healing agathon, a word denoting that which all would desire without question, the good. ⁶

Writing, as one of...