Peter James Kearney - Healing Rites of Passage: Salutogenesis in Serious Fun Camps

When from the circling faces, veils pass
And laughing fellowship grows warm
Arthur Davison Ficke

The butterfly represents celebration of life through venturesome living. It corresponds to Antonovskys use of heterostasis as the underlying spirit of salutogenesis.

This book examines how Therapeutic Recreation transforms the social health of children enduring or recovering from life-threatening illnesses such as cancer and leukaemia. With studies drawn from Serious Fun projects in the USA, the UK, France, Ireland and Israel, the author explores how camp experiences in convivial circumstances help to bring about healing. Employing central concepts from sociology and anthropology, such as liminality, mimesis and salutogenesis, Healing Rites of Passage explains why a brief secluded holiday can reform the campers shared situation of life-threatening illnesses towards health and flourishing. The whole process can be understood in terms of a rite of passage, as structured camp experiences enable children to shed previous sick roles and pass through a series of challenges in order to achieve social re-integration with a renewed zest for living. An empirically grounded study that reveals the analytical value of master concepts in the social sciences, this book will appeal to scholars in the fields of sociology, anthropology, paediatrics, social theory and the sociology of health, illness and medicine.

Peter James Kearney is Emeritus Professor of Paediatrics and Occasional Lecturer in Sociology at University College Cork, Ireland.

Breaking decisively with the often ideological and moralistic approach of treating problems of health and well-being as discrete and individual problems to be addressed in isolation both from one another and their broader social contexts, this series pursues the investigation of the ways in which contemporary malaises, diseases, illnesses and psychosomatic syndromes are related to cultural pathologies of the social body and disorders of the collective sprit de corps of contemporary society.

It avoids reductive psychological and biomedical understandings of pathologies including depression, stress-related illnesses, eating disorders, suicide and deliberate self-harm to focus instead on the socio-cultural contexts in which they occur, examining the radical changes to social structures and institutions, and the deep crises in our civilization as a whole to which such conditions are connected.

The Social Pathologies of Contemporary Civilization thus welcomes manuscripts from a broad range of disciplinary perspectives across the humanities and social sciences sociology, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, politics, economics and cultural studies, as well as from the fields of medicine social care, therapeutic practice and the healing arts that explore the fruitfulness locating health and well-being not simply in the individual body or soul, but within a trans-disciplinary imagination that takes into account the integral human persons situatedness within collective social bodies, particular communities, entire societies, or even whole civilizations.

Anxiety, Depression and Alzheimers Disease

The Place of Alcohol in Civilisation

Salutogenesis in Serious Fun Camps

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/The-Social-Pathologies-of-Contemporary-Civilization/book-series/ASHSER1434

Salutogenesis in Serious Fun Camps

First published 2019

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

2019 Peter James Kearney

The right of Peter James Kearney to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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ISBN: 978-0-415-79124-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-21246-3 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo

by codeMantra

This book would not have happened but for local circumstances in Cork necessitating my return to Paediatric Oncology in the Childrens Leukaemia Unit of the Mercy University Hospital, where I first witnessed the magic of the Barretstown experience. The late Samus ODonoghue, Michael Madden and the Paediatric Oncology Nurses had set up a deeply caring unit, which made practice there very satisfying. I am indebted to Kieran Keohane who was the accoucheur that supervised delivery of this book after a long gestation. He was also my guide to Sociology and a great interpreter of inchoate ideas. Kieran pointed out to me early on while still a practising Paediatrician that my interest in Barretstown was about Social Transformations. The book would not have been written without the constant care and support of Sin, who gave unstinting encouragement and, as the book took shape, was an incisive reader reflecting her interests in social work, law and mediation. Our daughters Fiona, Patricia, Oonagh and Sin Ann, and my brother Kevin in the USA all cast critical eyes over the text. Terry Kelleher knew better than most that perfection is the enemy of success an underlying theme of the book. Terry was a film producer and journalist of distinction. He died of multiple sclerosis after a long struggle, just before I could send him a PDF for comment. He is a missing reader buried at sea near Tyrella, Coosheen (another land in a small cove, anglicised from the Irish Tr Eile, Cuasn