Abstract
The review study describes the social context of illness and the world of patienthood. It shows how to approach ordinary people to achieve deeper understanding of their views about illness, namely by means of categories of mental representation of illness and collective representation of illness.
As a category of states, the study supports the concept of social representation. It mentions the problems of defining the concept of social representation.
It describes two approaches to the research of social representations (epistemological and applied). It analyzes the relationship between commonly shared knowledge and scientific knowledge, which is important for exploring beliefs about the disease of whole patient groups, all the laymen.
The article concludes by the claim that it is necessary to go from research of individual mental representations of illness to social representations of illness in large lay patients groups