About | Heather Stuckey

I've had type 1 diabetes since 1982, at age 12, back when there wasn't glucose monitors or pumps. Although diabetes management has made technological leaps, the psychosocial component, "What does diabetes mean to you," is still decades in the past.

This book illuminates the struggles with diabetes and the resilience that it takes to live with a chronic disease that requires constant attention. It also describes life with an eating disorder and diabetes, which is not usually discussed at doctor appointments and often ignored. Although the order of the events and the characters are fictionalized, the raw emotions of the challenges of diabetes are not.

As Associate Professor of Medicine at Penn State Hershey College of Medicine, I am the primary investigator for man qualitative and mixed methods research studies to improve the psychosocial outcomes and lives of people with diabetes.

Heather Stuckey, D.Ed., is Associate Professor of Medicine, Humanities and Public Health Sciences at the Penn State University Hershey College of Medicine. Dr. Stuckey’s expertise is interviewing people and analyzing their remarks to understand their perspectives on diabetes, with the goal of developing interventions to improve diabetes management and psychosocial outcomes. She was lead qualitative investigator for the DAWN2 (Diabetes Attitudes, Wishes and Needs) study involving over 10,000 people with diabetes, health care providers and family members around the world to identify psychosocial needs and strategies for dealing with those needs. Dr. Stuckey is extending that research to the UK, where she is studying how severe mental illness impacts living with diabetes. She recently completed a National Institutes of Health grant to analyze blog use by people with diabetes to understand the way the talk about diabetes with other people who know what living with diabetes is like. She works on other funded projects, all researching pathways to improved quality of life in living with chronic disease. Dr. Stuckey has published multiple articles on diabetes and psychosocial factors, social network support, habits of successful diabetes/weight management, and the use of creative expression in diabetes.

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