The CauseHealth Series Chapter 15 : A Broken Child – A Diseased Woman with Prof. Anna Luise Kirkengen

The Words Matter Podcast with Oliver Thomson

Welcome to another episode of The Words Matter Podcast.

In this episode of the CauseHealth Series I’m speaking with Professor Anna Luise Kirkengen about her Chapter 15 show wrote titled Broken Child – A Diseased Woman.

Anna Luise is Professor of General Practice in the Department of Public Health and Nursing, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), and has worked as General Practitioner for 30 years.

She specialises on the health impacts of childhood violation and is author many papers on the topic and also two books titled The Lived Experience of Violation - How Abused Children Become Unhealthy Adults and Inscribed Bodies - Health Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse, ‘Creating Chronicity.

In this episode we speak about:

• Her experience as a GP and researcher, and the importance of patient stories and why she thinks phenomenology and whole person approaches are a crucial and ethical requirement for all healthcare professional.
• We speak about the problem with the biomedical model from a clinical and research.
• We speak about how she sees the body as being inscribed and saturated with meaning and how healthcare must stop thinking of the silent body and the speaking mind.
• We talk about how frameworks that endorse mind-body dualism are deeply problematic, and how she sees all experience as embodied.
• Finally, Anna Luise shares how she facilitates the patients’ narratives and her openness to encourage patients to confide, in detail, their stories of harm, shame and abuse.

So this was a rich and detailed conversation with someone who has spent decades seeking to understand whole people; their suffering, their hardship and their lives. Anna Luise shares some specific details of the people she has encountered through her work that have been abused as children. If you think this might be too difficult to hear, you may choose to skip a couple of minutes from around 24 minutes in.

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