My Painful Self Health Identity Construction in Discussion Forums on Headaches and Migraines

This article looks at how people with chronic headaches perceive themselves by examining how they represent their (health) identities in and through language. It focuses on health forums/message boards where lay people suffering from headaches and migraines discuss different aspects of their conditions because forums are a potential site for challenging roles defined by medicine and institutional healthcare. The study is based on the qualitative and quantitative analysis of a 850,000-word-corpus comprising 5,000 postings to headache & migraine forums, drawing on the approach of Critical Discourse Analysis. I analyse the most frequent lexemes found in the corpus in order to get an overview of the most salient semantic domains at work in the discourse, and verbs used in connection with the headache sufferers, descriptors attributed to the pain itself, and the use of terms for medications. The data reviewed suggests that headache sufferers usually accept medicalized conceptions of their identities, but also emphasize the subjective experience of their condition, mostly subtly, however.