Simon Sahner: How Do You Talk to People Who Are Ill?  “You’ll Get Through This.”

Knowing how to talk appropriately to someone who is seriously ill is no easy matter. Drawing on his own experiences as a patient, Simon Sahner, explores the faux pas well-meaning family members and medical professionals can so easily make.

“No man is an island,” wrote English poet John Donne in the 17th century. And yet, when you are seriously ill, you sometimes wish you were exactly that – an island. Alone, unburdened by responsibility, free from the social obligation of having to consider other people’s feelings. This is especially true when those around you are trying their hardest to make you feel less alone. The ill person’s reaction to such efforts can seem unfair, even ungrateful – after all, behind these gestures lie the best of intentions, or sometimes their own desperation and fear. But illness is an exceptional situation – for the ill person and no less so for those who care for them.

Finding the Right Words

The problem is that saying the “right” thing to someone who is seriously ill often seems like an impossible task. Of course, it is possible. But I know how hard it is for those on the outside to strike the right tone, find the right words or even adopt the right facial expression. I know this because, for a while, I was that person – the one it felt almost impossible to speak appropriately to.

I realised this on my very first day in hospital. At the start of my treatment, a doctor told me: “This is going to be very hard.” How was I supposed to react to that? Of course it was going to be hard, I thought. If it were a walk in the park, people would sign up for chemotherapy voluntarily. At the same time, I felt indignation, because how could she possibly know? Later that same day, another doctor who was monitoring my treatment casually dropped the phrase: “You’ll get through this.” How could he know that?

There is a certain kind of remark that still triggers a defensive reaction in me even today – claims about the course of an illness, an examination or a treatment that nobody can make with any certainty: You’ll get through this. It’s nothing. It’s harmless. If these statements were always true, no one would ever fall ill or die from a disease. The people who say these things are often those who are closest to me. They want to give me courage and a sense of security. And yet – when someone tells me before a scan that they won’t find anything and it will all be over in a couple of hours, I think the same thing every time: okay, so I won’t go. Maybe I should follow the example of writer Wolfgang Herrndorf, who wanted to give his friends and family guidelines telling them how they should talk to him during his illness.

Two Languages for Describing Illness

It is understandable that those close to you find it difficult to speak with you when you are ill – and it takes a great deal of sensitivity on both sides to communicate well in such an extreme situation. From doctors, however, you would expect that they could do this better. In my view, treating patients appropriately is part of the job – on the medical level, but equally on the communicative level.

Doctors should know that comments like “I don’t like the look of this” while examining an MRI scan in the presence of a patient is the wrong way to communicate. And yet it happens regularly. Sociologist Arthur Frank explains this phenomenon with the two terms: illness talk and disease talk. While illness describes the physical and emotional experience of suffering as a process, disease refers to the condition in the strictly medical sense. Illness talk and disease talk are, in other words, two different languages for describing one and the same thing. It requires the doctor to act as a translator – explaining the situation to the patient in an appropriate and sensitive way.

Sometimes Silence is the Best Option

So, what is the right way to speak to someone who is seriously ill? Some people seem to know instinctively – they find the right words, or, even better, they don’t search for words at all, but simply sit in silence or talk about something else entirely. The finest words spoken to me, however, came from a nurse. As I was leaving the hospital to spend a few days at home, he looked at me and simply said: “You’re doing well, Mr Sahner.”

March 2026