A wave of acute or chronic pain is falling today on the world, whose devastating effects can no longer be ignored. This file returns to the long history of this often repressed side of human life and its social implications.
Phenomenon at the same time physical, psychological and social, pain is often difficult to describe by words, even though these remain the main medium of its diagnosis. Invasive, and sometimes so unbearable that it becomes disabling, it is the subject of knowledge still stammering and therefore necessarily controversial. The physiological mechanisms of pain remain difficult to objectify for the sciences of the living and medicine.
In the absence of organic markers attesting to him undoubtedly, the patients of the patient are often the only point of Archimedes on which his therapists and hermeneutes can rely. The social and human sciences are therefore essential to reduce interpretative uncertainties that surround these words not only, but also all the non-verbal signs by which it is expressed or leaves traces of its presence.
As for the pains of the past, in the absence of oral testimonies, it is mainly thanks to archaeological work on their textual or pictorial evocations that we can access.
However, the devastating effects of these pains, both on the lives of individuals and on those of organizations and societies, can no longer be ignored.
A wave of chronic pain is falling today on Europe as, with a little ahead, another has already engulfed the United States. According to several observers, it is a “ pain epidemic “That we are dealing with. Professional stress, sedentary lifestyle, and other factors linked to our social organization contribute to explaining the spread of pain which, if it is not viral, follows systemic dynamics.
The echoes of the American preceding of this epidemic have reached us in particular through the chronicles of the crisis of opioids and the ravages which it caused within the American white working class and the African-American populations. This magnitude crisis has highlighted the central role of large pharmaceutical laboratories in the development of care protocols and, at the same time, clearly pointed out the limits and dangers of purely medication of pain. The many deaths caused by this crisis correspond to what economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton called the “ dead in despair »), That is to say the deaths caused by suicide, overdose or drug addiction, whose link they have demonstrated with the increase in inequalities, the dysfunction of the American health system and the inadequacy of the social security net.
Despite the growing magnitude of the problem in the United States as in Europe, the care courses offered by the public hospital to relieve the 12 million French people in chronic pain remain stammering compared to the efforts made to deal with other pathologies. However, there is an urgency to take this question seriously which makes a huge burden on public finances weigh. The costs are considerable: absences at work, invalidity, treatments, drugs, but also recourse to home aid, social workers and the implementation of ergonomic arrangements. In the United States, chronic pain costs more than $ 500 billion a year, a cost higher than that of cardiovascular diseases, cancer and diabetes. To take another example for which these costs have been assessed, recent estimates suggest that, in Denmark, a million working days are lost each year due to chronic pain.
The pain thus reveals how the body is at the hinge between our social being and our biological being. If, today, so many people suffer simultaneously, is it not because their lives are marked by an extractivism of their ever more intense forces, which hurts and mutiles their bodies ? This file wants to take this pain seriously by examining, in all its dimensions, the unspeakable or ineffable nature of acute or chronic pain that resist the pretension of a medical science which would like to make the bodies speak by the sole result of biological data.