Suchergebnisse

Considering women living with multiple sclerosis (MS), motherhood may represent a complicated event. Our aim in this study is to explore the personal meanings related to maternity and illness in women living with this disease. We have involved twenty women suffering from MS and we have administered an open interview introduced by a trigger question as a prompt aimed to elicit a narrative of their experience of illness, wishes, doubts, fears and life-projects with regard to motherhood. The interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim in order to carry out an analysis of the textual corpus. We have performed the textual analysis of the transcribed interviews through the T-LAB software. Performing a cluster analysis, four thematic clusters emerged: Daily Pain, Relationship with Health Care Services, Closing of a Circle and Family Role. We have interpreted the relationship between these themes using factorial mapping through 3 meaning vectors, representative of the following dynamics: From Concrete to Abstract; From Life-Project to Relapse; From Health Agencies to Family Support. All these meaning-vectors seem to describe the relationship between maternity and illness. Some aspects, as the presence of a stable partner or knowing diagnosis for more than ten years, might represent supporting factors for a project of motherhood. Starting from the results obtained, we provide some proposals for the definition of goals and strategies of psychological counselling within the Health Care Services.

Bisexual people are a strongly stigmatized population experiencing health disparities caused by social stigmatization. The predominant framework helping to understand these health disparities and the impact of stigma on mental health of social groups belonging to a sexual minority identity constitutes the minority stress theory. In Italy, studies assessing this model in bisexual populations are very limited. Within this framework, the current study aimed at assessing in 381 Italian bisexual individuals (62 men and 319 women) the effects of anti-bisexual discrimination, proximal stressors (i.e., anticipated binegativity, internalized binegativity, and outness), and resilience on psychological distress. The results suggested that only anti-bisexual discrimination and internalized binegativity were positively associated with psychological distress, and that resilience was negatively associated with mental health issues. Furthermore, the results suggested that internalized binegativity mediated the relationship between anti-bisexual discrimination and mental health problems. No moderating effect of resilience was found. This is the first study to have thoroughly applied minority stress in Italian bisexual people, providing Italian clinicians and researchers with an outline of the associations between minority stress, stigma, resilience, and psychological distress within this population.