The Meaning of Coping With Psoriasis: A Phenomenological Study

Psoriasis is a chronic mental and physical disease that leads to many challenges for people along their lives so that its compatibility and acceptance by the patient is hardly possible..
The objective of the present study was to describe and explain the experienced coping strategies by patients with Psoriasis..
The present study was a qualitative phenomenological interpretation, which was conducted on people with psoriasis, who had referred to Imam Khomeini hospital of Ahvaz during June and March 2014. In this study, 15 people with psoriasis were selected based on purposive sampling and they were asked to express their life experiences regarding coping strategies. Data were collected through a deep and unstructured interview, and the method of Diekelmann et al. (1989) was used for data analysis..
After analysis of the texts of interviews, the main theme, which was attempt to cope with disease and four sub-themes namely “disease, the reason for spiritual promotion”, “intellectual insight”, “supporting behavior” and “concealing disease” were extracted, which indicated the patients’ experiences when coping with psoriasis..
The results of the present study showed that people with psoriasis experienced many challenges in order to cope with this disease, and accurate identification of these challenges and real understanding of their experiences by health professionals, and reflecting positive experiences such as spiritual promotion via their disease to other patients are recommended..