Preface -- Chapter 1. Conceptualizing Human Pain and Suffering -- Chapter 2. Narrative Accounts of the Agony of Suffering -- Chapter 3. Statistical Portrait of Suffering in America -- Chapter 4. Suffering on a Global Scale -- Chapter 5. World Suffering Expands as Gaps in Care Widen -- Chapter 6. Ending Preventable Suffering: Ethics and Social Change -- Index.

This brief on human suffering adds to understanding of suffering by contextualizing both stories and statistics on pain and suffering, while showing that suffering adds a useful perspective to contemporary thought and research on quality of life, social well-being, and measures of societal progress. The scholarship on suffering is made more comprehensible in the book by using nine different conceptual frames that have been used for making sense of suffering. The primary focus of this work is with the last frame, the quality of life frame. Overall, these chapters show for the first time how the research on quality of life and well-being can be enhanced by embracing human suffering.