How Gender Role Influences the Illness Narrative and the Reconstruction of Patient Identity

Journal title RIVISTA SPERIMENTALE DI FRENIATRIA
Author/s Isabella Serafini, Francesco Ferrarello
Publishing Year 2026 Issue 2026/1
Language Italian Pages 23 P. 49-71 File size 802 KB
DOI 10.3280/RSF2026-001004
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Narrative-based medicine (NBM) was developed to help healthcare professionals maintain their enthusiasm, curiosity and passion for patients’ stories, thereby promoting the personalisation and humanisation of care, strengthening the therapeutic alliance, and improving health outcomes. NBM can be useful for individuals and healthcare professionals, helping to alleviate stress, establish contact, and deal with the emotional impact of living with illness. However, NBM is often criticised for being anachronistic in the context of modern life and healthcare, where tight deadlines are the norm. This view fails to consider the idea that NBM can be a positive addition to daily clinical practice, rather than something that takes time away from it. It can enrich practice by changing the way healthcare professionals communicate and helping them understand how to embrace and utilise people’s diversity to provide appropriate care. One way in which NBM can enhance the therapeutic relationship is by ensuring that treatments are more appropriate and specific. Gender medicine is one area where this can be achieved. For example, studying differences in men and women communication can help to capture different perspectives and improve interactions within the person-caregiver- healthcare professional triad. Analysing how men and women reconstruct their gender roles through narratives can help us to understand how to address users, which aspects of prevention or treatment plans could be circumvented or reinterpreted, and what motivates them. In this article, we provide a brief summary of the literature on this topic.

Keywords: Gender, Femminility, Masculinity, Illness, Narrative, Storytelling.

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Isabella Serafini, Francesco Ferrarello, Come il ruolo di genere influenza la narrazione della malattia e la ricostruzione dell’identità del paziente in "RIVISTA SPERIMENTALE DI FRENIATRIA" 1/2026, pp 49-71, DOI: 10.3280/RSF2026-001004