Illness and Object Relations: Narratives From Women With Pulmonary Hypertension

Objectives:

 The current research study aims at investigating the illness experience of people affected by Pulmonary Hypertension (PH), as a particularly challenging rare disease that is paradigmatic for the understanding of regulatory processes.

Methods :

The study used Giorgi’s method to analyze the illness narratives of 11 adult Italian women affected by PH according to a qualitative phenomenological approach. An object relations perspective looking at chronic illness as an internal object was adopted for result interpretation.

Results:

 Four general themes were identified that characterize illness narratives of people with PH and illustrate the progressive stages of the disease. They respectively deal with the body/mind disruption at symptom onset, the protagonization of illness in the search for a diagnosis, the complicated grief at the time of diagnosis, and the anaclitic strategies to face the future.

Conclusion:

 Findings make a significant contribution to the exploration of the subjective experience of people with PH in managing illness-related challenges from symptom onset to after diagnosis.