Longitudinal Mixed Modelling of Emergency Department Use Among a Sample of Homeless Participants in a Housing First Demonstration Trial.

The present Canadian study sought to identify predictors of emergency department (ED) use in a sample of adults who are homeless. Four hundred eighty-three participants were interviewed quarterly for two years, reporting their housing status, income, food security, physical/mental health, and other social determinants of health. Survey data were linked to administrative health and social services data.

Fixed Nodes of Transience: Narratives of Homelessness and Emergency Department Use.

Discourse in popular media, public policy, and academic literature contends that people who are homeless frequently make inappropriate use of hospital emergency department (ED) services. Although researchers have investigated the ED experiences of people who are homeless, no previous studies have examined how this population understands the role of the ED in their health care and in their day-to-day lives. In the present study, 16 individuals participated in semistructured interviews regarding their ED experiences, and narrative analysis was applied to their responses.

Men, fire, and burns: Stories of fighting, healing, and emotions.

Burn recovery is a difficult process full of physical and psychological challenges. With increasing survival rates, there has been renewed interest in the psychological aspects of burn recovery. As men represent over 70% of all burn patients, it is particularly important to study how men experience and interpret this process.

Broken heart stories: understanding Aboriginal women's cardiac problems.

Many Aboriginal communities call heart problems, and in particular cardiovascular disease, "White man's sickness." At the same time, Aboriginal women present with some of the highest rates of this disease. Against this backdrop, we explored how women with cardiac problems understand their heart health and used narrative-discursive methods to analyze interviews conducted with women from two First Nations in North America.

"Put on your face to face the world": women's narratives of burn injury.

The survival rate of individuals with burn injury has significantly increased due to medical advances in burn care. This has led to a need to focus on psychological aspects of burn injury recovery, particularly on how people come to terms with their changed bodies. The literature suggests that burn size and severity are not directly associated with the degree of distress but that subjective perceptions and interpretations - of, for instance, body image - are pertinent.

Risk factors for post-injury mental health problems.

Serious nonfatal physical injuries and burns are common occurrences that can have substantial implications for personal, social, and occupational functioning. Such injuries are frequently associated with significant mental health issues, and compromised quality of life and well-being. The purpose of this review is to summarize the current literature on physical, psychological, and social risk factors for mental health issues post-injury and to contextualize findings using Engel's biopsychosocial framework.

Psychological distress and self-care engagement: healing after a cardiac intervention.

Silencing the self, a relational concept, occurs when individuals overvalue others' standards, self-sacrifice their needs for others, inhibit self-expression, and experience a sense of dividedness between their inner and outer self. Given the emerging literature highlighting the importance of relational beliefs and experiences in coronary heart disease, the contribution of a concept such as self-silencing to the cardiac healing process is valuable to consider. This study investigated self-silencing dimensions, psychological distress (anxiety and depressive symptoms), and self-care engagement after a serious cardiac event.

Recovered or recovering: negotiating rehabilitation after stroke.

The role of narrative discourse has been increasingly recognized as crucial to all partners involved in the rehabilitation process after acquired brain injury. Particularly within the family, narrative offers an experiential space for meaning-making. To better understand this joint meaning-making process, a narrative-discursive methodology was used to analyze a family's conversation that took place 1 year after the mother had a stroke.

Heart stories: men and women after a cardiac incident.

In this study we explore the views and beliefs of men and women about cardiovascular disease and the emotions and social relations that are involved. Women and men attending a cardiovascular rehabilitation program participated in two in-depth interviews carried out with each individual six months after a first serious cardiac event. The transcribed interviews were analyzed using a narrative-discursive methodology.

Living with Parkinson's disease-managing identity together.

The specific aim of this paper is to discuss how individuals living with Parkinson's disease and their main family supports perceive communications with each other, with a focus on their roles related to care. The paper is based on individual interviews conducted with individuals and their main family support person. The transcripts were analyzed based on grounded theory and "managing identity together" emerged as the core category.

Continuity amid chaos: neurotrauma, loss of memory, and sense of self.

In serious illness or disability, individuals commonly say that their sense of self has dramatically changed. One might expect that the experience of a radically altered sense of self would be even more profound in individuals after neurotrauma because it is the brain itself that suddenly, and often literally, becomes "strange." The aim of this study was to investigate how people left with autobiographical memory impairments--impairments that also affect the capacity to organize complex linguistic productions such as autobiographical narratives--experience themselves and, specifically, their sense of self.

Remembering without a past: individuals with anterograde memory impairment talk about their lives.

This paper describes the linguistic resources people with anterograde amnesia draw on in conversational narratives. Because of their problems in recollecting post-morbid memories, it is particularly challenging for such individuals to refer to personal experiences. Seven patients with anterograde memory impairments due to neurotrauma were interviewed one year post-event.

Islands of memory: Autobiographical remembering in amnestics.

In amnestics with anterograde amnesia, memories of post-onset autobiographical experiences, if present at all, are typically barren and impoverished. However, there have been sporadic reports of islands of memory--memories that are vivid, detailed, and specific to time and place. The aim of this study was to verify the presence of such memories and examine their incidence rate.

Making sense of traumatic experiences: telling your life with fragile X syndrome.

The discourse of individuals with fragile X syndrome has been described as fragmented, tangential, and associatively connected, resulting in autobiographical narratives that are incoherent and difficult to understand. In this article, the authors discuss the case of an adolescent female with moderate mental retardation due to fragile X syndrome. The analysis of her autobiographical stories, rather than being primarily reflective of cognitive impoverishment, reveals a different--narrative--mode of thought.

Interpretative memories of artworks.

It is well known that memories of self-relevant experiences are reconstructed over time. Artworks often require an elongated period of interpretative meaning-making. Such works were therefore used to study temporal aspects of memory construction.