Is illness ineffable?

It is often presupposed that illness experiences are deeply ineffable or contain elements that are incommunicable. It is assumed that illness experiences are too traumatic to be coherently articulated, too extreme to be sharable, and isolate the ill person in a way that renders communication about illness impossible. This results in (1) an inability to understand one's own experiences and (2) an inability to share them. I suggest that ineffability can be construed as total ((1) and (2)) or partial (just (2)), as unique (or not) to embodied experiences, and as hermetically isolating (or not). This produces a taxonomy of ineffability claims, which can be used to study the communicative problems faced by ill persons, especially within healthcare settings.

I argue that total ineffability only applies to a small subset of cases. Partial ineffability is more common and can be mitigated more readily. I conclude that claims for the ineffability of illness should be treated with caution, as uncritical acceptance of such claims risks undermining the subjectivity, agency and interests of ill persons. Moreover, we should strongly advocate the use of tools for combating (1) and (2), many of which are already at our disposal.