Use of health care services for psychological distress by immigrants in an urban multicultural milieu.

Objective: Research in the United States tends to attribute low rates of use of mental health services by immigrants to economic barriers. The purpose of our study was to examine this issue in the context of Canada's universal health care system.

Methods: A survey of the catchment area of a comprehensive clinic in Montreal interviewed random samples of 924 Canadian-born individuals and 776 immigrants born in the Caribbean (n = 264), Vietnam (n = 234), or the Philippines (n = 278) to assess their health care use for somatic symptoms, psychological distress, and recent life events.

Religious practice and psychological distress: the importance of gender, ethnicity and immigrant status.

The present study examined the relationship between religious practice and psychological distress in a culturally diverse urban population to explore how religious affiliation, gender, ethnicity, and immigrant status affect this relationship. Data were drawn from a study of health care utilization in Montreal. A stratified community sample of 1485 yielded four religious groups: Protestant (n = 205), Catholic (813), Jewish (201), and Buddhist (150), and a group with no declared religion (116).

[Phenomenology: a scientific approach to lived experiences].

Phenomenology is a philosophical current which intends to observe and describe the meaning attributed to an experience from the consciousness of the person who is living it. While it can be applied to different domains, especially to human care it describes subjective phenomenon such as suffering or quality of life. It constitutes as a real discipline, with its epistemology, its specific data (the individual's narration), its method of analysis to find the speech units of significance, and collaboration between researcher and participant (who becomes a co-researcher).

[Marital communication and depressive symptoms in couples in which the woman has cancer of the breast].

If doctor-patient communication is a frequent subject of research, couples communication where one partner has cancer is quite recent. Some studies deal with couples communication, but from an anecdotic perspective, without any operational measure. The aim of this paper is to study couples' communication frequency and link it to depressive symptomatology.

Correlates of illness worry in chronic fatigue syndrome.

Background: Anxiety about illness leading to restriction of activity and physical deconditioning has been hypothesized to contribute to the chronicity of fatigue. Pathological symptom attributions, personality traits, and depression have all been hypothesized to contribute to illness worry.

Methods: We compared 45 chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and 40 multiple sclerosis (MS) outpatients using a battery of psychometric instruments comprising the 12-item Illness Worry scale, the Symptom Interpretation Questionnaire (SIQ), the NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI), and a modified version of the SCL-90R Depression scale.

Psychological correlates of functional status in chronic fatigue syndrome.

Background: The present study was designed to test a cognitive model of impairment in chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) in which disability is a function of severity of fatigue and depressive symptoms, generalized somatic symptom attributions and generalized illness worry.

Methods: We compared 45 CFS and 40 multiple sclerosis (MS) outpatients on measures of functional ability, fatigue severity, depressive symptoms, somatic symptom attribution and illness worry.

Results: The results confirmed previous findings of lower levels of functional status and greater fatigue among CFS patients compared to a group of patients with MS.