Condividere l’esperienza, conoscere la malattia, comprendere il corpo: campi-scuola per giovani diabetici

In this paper the author presents some anthropological reflections on the body, the processes of knowledge of a chronic autoimmune disease such as type 1 diabetes mellitus and the possibility of processing and sharing the experience of illness during educational camps for young diabetics, both with each other and with the pediatricians who take care of them, in an unusual setting, outside the hospital, in a place used for holidays. Starting from the ethnographic material collected in the field, the educational camps for young diabetics organized in the Campania Region from 2014 to 2016 by the Paediatric Diabetes Care Unit of the Azienda Ospedaliera Universitaria Federico II of Naples, the author discusses more general issues about illness/disease, care processes in cronicity and humanity in the health contexts of contemporary culture and society. The goal of this anthropological research is to underline the useful transformative potential of narrative process of chronic disease and the importance of a true “logic of care”, showing the complexity of life that flows around the experience of being diabetic. This experience, like the exciting circumstances of educational camps, an increasingly recognized segment in the assistance to diabetic children and adolescents in biomedical contexts, is often intensely shared between patients and pediatricians with major consequences in terms of care and health.