Get started
Work

Growing up, ill: the challenges of youth for young people living with chronic illness

Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Chronic illness in young people disrupts many of the normative assumptions that pervade cultural understandings of youth, bodies, and health. This paper draws on a series of semi-structured qualitative interviews with 33 young adults (aged 19–29 years) to explore how chronic illness can unsettle young peoples’ sense of youth and their imagined future(s). We argue that the sense of disorientation and unease reported by our participants suggests that narratives and expectations around youth struggle to accommodate the experience of chronic illness, and vice versa. By tracing how young people living with chronic illness are made to feel ‘out of place’ – in social interactions, in school, in time – it becomes clear that the social, educational, and healthcare settings that young people find themselves in are not well-equipped to deal with chronic illness at this point in the life course, and that this can lead to feelings of disconnection and disruption. These tensions mediate and accentuate the ways in which precarity is felt by, and imposed on, young people who live with chronic illness.
DOI: 10.1080/13676261.2025.2578623
Language: English
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4415719397
FWCI: 2.817
Cites: 58
Cited by: 2
Related to: 10