Narrative Analysis of Illness Experiences of Alcohol Abuse Patients

Park, Eal Whan; Kim, Jong Sung

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Patients' Illness experiences are described in the 4 categories; meanings or patients' thoughts, patients' feelings, patients' expectations, and influence of illness on patients' lives. The purpose of this study is to collect patients' stories when they are interviewed in a family medicine clinic, and analyze to make a systematic database of the patients' illness experiences. METHOD: We recorded and analyzed illness narratives of the 19 alcohol abuse patients. One of the researchers interviewed the patients directly to collect narrative data by using a semi-structured questionnaire.
RESULTS
The meanings that they had in alcohol abuse were making a social relationship, vitality, forgetting, anesthetic drugs to relief emotional pain, means to relief thirst, hunger, depressed mood. They told that the physical effects of alcohol drinking were gastrointestinal disturbance and change in body weight. Psychosocial or behavioral changes were sleep disturbance, loss of memory, drinking alone, absence from work after drinking, avoidance of related persons and guilty feeling. The patients concerned about their chronic drinking habit, physical symptoms, behavioral changes, deterioration in physical health, withdrawal in social roles, and sick persons among their families, As for the expectations for a physician's support patients told that they had to stop by himself, and some patients talked about good medicines or strong medicines, or checking blood tests.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion the patients had the positive reasons for alcohol drinking, but they had also negative experiences after drinking. Deducing from the expressed denials, we can guess that the negative experiences might have no effect on the patients' behavior change.