Bendy Bodies, Bendy Minds: Co-Occurring Conditions and the Contested Boundaries of Mind and Body

Healthcare systems remain structured around a persistent mind–body dualism that cannot accommodate complex, shifting multisystem experiences. This fragmentation contributes to diagnostic overshadowing, delayed treatment, and avoidable harm for neurodivergent and chronically ill people, reflecting not isolated bias but structural effects of classificatory systems, service design, and digital infrastructures that operationalise this divide. Using a three‑stage comparative design (community → clinical → digital), the project analyses how ‘bendy’ bodies and minds are enacted across services and how patients’ accounts are translated, reduced or reformatted as they move through them. This includes AI‑enabled triage, electronic health records, and algorithmic decision‑support tools that shape what becomes legible within care. The project reframes narrative as distributed epistemic labour: the work clinicians, patients and families perform to hold together knowledge that institutional systems keep apart. By identifying points of epistemic loss and sites of resistance, the project moves from critique to co‑produced intervention. It proposes new ways of operationalising complexity, multimorbidity and uncertainty across healthcare infrastructures, establishing narrative theory as a service‑relevant epistemology that can support more integrated, humane and sustainable models of care. Keywords: neurodiversity; autism; ADHD; multimorbidity; hypermobility; pain; gastrointestinal conditions; ME/CFS; chronic illness; narrative; integrated care; primary care; digital health; medical humanities; patient experience.