Management and flare-ups: How conceptual metaphors shape fibromyalgia narratives in digital communities
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Date
2026
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Abstract
This study evaluates the conceptual representations implied by the conceptual metaphors usedwhen individuals refer to pain in an online support group for fibromyalgia. Grounded inConceptual Metaphor Theory and informed by a discourse-analytic approach to healthcommunication, this research elucidates the most prevalent conceptual representations aroundpain-talk in the Reddit community r/fibromyalgia. A corpus comprised of 182,819 tokens wascompiled from publicly available posts and comments. The corpus was uploaded to Sketch Engineand a concordance search that targeted the most frequent pain related terms in the corpus wasconducted, after which random samples of 100 instances per term were extracted. Potentialmetaphor-related words were identified using an adapted version of the Metaphor IdentificationProcedure Vrije Universiteit (MIPVU) and an inductive coding protocol was used to determineand establish the most prevalent conceptual metaphors found in the corpus. Findings show that theusers relied on conceptual metaphors to articulate experiences of pain, cognitive disruption, anddisease management. Some conceptual metaphors, such as PAIN IS FIRE, FIBROMYALGIA IS ANEXTERNAL AGENT and PAIN IS AN ENTITY THAT CAN BE MANAGED revealed perceived loss of agencyby patients of fibromyalgia, highlight the complexities of expressing pain, and help describeabstract symptoms of the disease. The study concluded that the conceptual representations putforward by the conceptual metaphors found in the corpus construe the disease and its symptomsas complex and rapidly changing experiences. Overall, the use of metaphorical expressions provedto be a tool for understanding that facilitates empathy and patient empowerment.
Description
Tesis (Magíster en Letras con mención en Lingüística)--Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 2026
Keywords
Health and Discourse, Discourse Analysis, Conceptual Metaphor Theory, Online Support Groups, Fibromyalgia