Illness as a crisis of meaning: Psycho-spiritual agendas in health care

The term "psychosocial" has come to refer to a host of issues in health care. Its wide, indiscriminate usage in referring to almost any non-biophysical aspect of illness obscures or distorts the experience of illness as a "crisis of meaning." The term "psycho-spiritual agenda" is introduced to emphasize the problems of meaning associated with illness, and to avoid the potential reductionism, pathological skew, and interventionist bias of conventional "psychosocial" analyses of the illness experience.