Disease, sickness or Illness?

In Anglophone contexts, the experience of “feeling unwell” or “being ill” can be expressed through different terms — disease, illness, and sickness — each of which refers to a distinct dimension of what it means to be unwell.

In Italian, by contrast, we rely on a single word: malattia (illness/disease). It is as if there were only one possible notion, one way of understanding and describing what happens to the body and to the person.

​

This apparent linguistic simplicity is far from neutral. On the contrary, it tends to compress into a single category dimensions that are profoundly different: the biological, the subjective, and the social. What is distinguished and analytically separated in Anglophone contexts is often collapsed and taken for granted in our language, reinforcing a unified — and implicitly biomedical — understanding of illness.

Yet, upon closer reflection, it becomes evident that illness is anything but univocal. Far from any claim to objectivity, it reveals itself as one of the most interpretative, situated, and culturally constructed concepts of human experience.

​

This leads us to a fundamental question: what do we really mean when we say we are ill? And, more importantly, if we seek to heal, what exactly are we trying to heal from?

​

At this level, the issue becomes profoundly epistemological: it concerns the ways in which knowledge is produced, the criteria through which we define what is real, pathological, and treatable. To question illness, therefore, is to question the knowledge that defines it — and, with it, the forms of life that such knowledge renders visible, legitimate, or, conversely, marginal.