| Summary: | 碩士 === 中臺科技大學 === 護理系碩士班 === 102 === In a warning issued by the World Health Organization, depression is predicted to become one of the world’s most significant diseases by 2020. Statistics show that 5%-10% of men or women have suffered depression at least once in their lifetime. Depression is usually caused by multiple factors such as long-term family/interpersonal dysfunction, personal communication traits or excessive pressure. Considerable recent studies have been carried out in Taiwan and other countries, with their emphasis mostly on patients’ life experiences, history of depression, or interactions with family members, and rarely on individual experiences in interpersonal communications. Therefore, this study aims to understand the communication experiences of patients with depression.
Participants in this study are 20 year-old or older patients with depression, selected from the outpatients of a regional hospital in Northern Taiwan, using purposive sampling. Data were collected with a voice-recorder pen through one-on-one in-depth interviews. When the data reached a point of saturation, 10 participants had been interviewed. The data were analyzed using Tesch approach. The results of this study can be divided into three major themes and six subthemes. The three major themes are: (1) the shift in communication: types of straightforward or suppressing communication; difficulty of recovery from the causes of depression, (2) causes and effects of communicative problems: resistance has been made both inside and outside interference; difficult to escape the vortex circulation, (3)coping to problematic communication: strategies of behavioral coping and psychological adjustment.
Six suggestions are proposed based on the results of this study: (1) medical workers should make a cautious evaluation of patients’ pre-depression communication traits, approaches to communication conflicts, factors triggering conflicts and the approaches to the problems, as well as help them understand and learn to face the reasons behind the conflicts, (2) medical workers should discuss current conditions with the patients’ family members or spouses at a meeting, or organize family therapy groups or family therapy workshops centering on patients with depression, in order to facilitate communication, (3) patients with depression are encouraged to attend patient support groups, interpersonal communication groups, or stress-relieving groups offered by hospitals or nonprofit organizations, in order to learn to deal with communication issues in a positive way, (4) the general public, patients and their families should be offered special seminars on interpersonal communication conflicts or family support groups, through which counseling professionals can provide early assistance to both patients and non-patients in solving interpersonal communications problems, (5) medical workers have to receive on-the-job training with regard to interpersonal relationship theories and communication skills, and (6) future research in this area is suggested to examine the communication of patients with depression in medical facilities at national, township or other levels. Future studies are expected to build a depression-specific communication performance evaluation based on this study’s findings, which can help to identify depression-causing communication situations as soon as possible. This study’s findings on communication experiences of patients with depression will hopefully provide a reference for clinical practice, education, research and policymaking, and eventually ensure better medical treatments for patients with depression.
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