Intersectionality, healthcare and myalgic encephalomyelitis: Reflections from experience, 2026, Hunt et al

[forestglip]

Intersectionality, healthcare and myalgic encephalomyelitis: Reflections from experience

Hunt, Joanne

Abstract
Healthcare practice and policy impacting disabled groups has historically reduced disability to an individual phenomenon and homogenised experiences of disability.

Such practices – which lack cultural and structural sensitivity – risk not only individualising, pathologising and responsibilising social oppressions tied to disability, but also erasing multiply marginalised experiences, knowledges and needs within any given disabled group. Moreover, by overlooking the interlocking macrosystems of oppression that shape identities and produce inequities, the potential for transformative practice and systemic change is reduced.

In contrast, intersectionality demands that disability be understood as emerging from personal-political interplays, and beyond a single-axis issue, constituted through mutually reinforcing systems of representation and power.

Focusing on myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome and drawing on my own experience as a multiply marginalised disabled person in the UK, I make a case for UK healthcare to be informed by intersectionality, not as empty rhetoric but as critical social praxis and much-needed epistemic intervention.

Web | DOI | PDF | Feminism & Psychology | Open Access

 

[Trish]

It's hard work for me to read something like this because of the subject specific jargon. I do realise it's not written for people like me not tuned in to this academic field. I really shouldn't attempt it late at night.

From an online dictionary:

intersectionality​

the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.​

A quote from the article

"There are conceptual frameworks beyond the ME/CFS arena that already integrate, or could integrate, intersectionality as a core principle in healthcare, including structural competency (Metzl & Hansen, 2014) and the power threat meaning framework (Johnstone & Boyle, 2018; see also Olkin, 2017; Timothy & Umana Garcia, 2020). These resist pathologising, responsibilising and sociopolitically void models of care. Drawing on some of these approaches, I have proposed a biopsychosocial-structural model to reimagine ME/CFS and other stigmatised conditions (Hunt, 2022). These frameworks collectively endorse a ‘new’ healthcare paradigm (Prilleltensky, 2009) that refuses to reduce disability or body–mind nonnormativity to a personal or single-axis issue."​

I have been puzzling away at it. I think the idea is that organisations like BACME need to listen to people from all sections of society - ethnicity, class, age, gender, disability - in order to provide appropriate care. I have no idea what that would mean in practice.

I don't understand what the biopsychosocial model has to do with this. Maybe it's a different one from the one that has plagued us with CBT/GET for decades.

In the last paragraph, on marginalised groups, I like this sentence:

"Tokenistic, objectifying, voyeuristic inclusion is at least as disempowering as complete exclusion"​

@Josefina, if you're reading this, can you help us out with a plain English summary? As you can see, I'm struggling.