Unpacking the Assumptions, Oversights and Consequences that Surround Young People’s Difficulties in Accessing Chronic Illness Diagnosis and Care

Abstract Young people living with chronic illness navigate a series of age-specific difficulties that emerge from the way in which both youth and chronic illness are constructed in social and healthcare imaginaries. In this article we draw on 33 interviews with young adults (aged 19–29 years) living in Australia to examine the ways in which age is a factor that shapes the barriers and biases young people face when seeking therapeutic interventions for illness. We suggest that normative images of young people – including their assumed health, and their supposed unreliability and immaturity – can mean that both healthcare practitioners and other adults with authority, such as teachers, misinterpret their symptoms. Further, we suggest that the usual vocabulary and structure of ‘declining health’ struggles to recognise the emergence of illness while young. For our participants, the consequences of having their knowledge of their own physical experiences routinely doubted extended beyond healthcare – these experiences of being ignored or dismissed could form a foundation for how participants thought about their bodies, health, and healthcare. We therefore argue that socially constructed expectations of young people must be examined and critiqued in relation to illness to, first, uncover the ways in which chronic illness is structurally missed, and second, construct more appropriate ways for recognising illness and providing care.