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EMBODIMENT OF SEVERE AND ENDURING MENTAL ILLNESS: FINDING MEANING IN SCHIZOPHRENIA

For many individuals, schizophrenia is a severe and enduring illness. While nurses need to understand the symptomatology of the illness in order to provide specific care and treatment, it also is important to find out how people with schizophrenia embody the illness. Capturing this knowledge will help nurses to provide more appropriate care to these individuals. This paper, which is taken from a larger qualitative study, reports the lived experience of young adults with schizophrenia. Three main themes emerged from the data, which highlighted how these individuals found meaning in schizophrenia. The first theme, “embodied temporality: illness as a catastrophic experience,” portrayed how schizophrenia affected participants' temporality or lived time. The second theme, “embodied relationality: illness as a mediator of social relationships,” reflected how the illness affected their relationships with others. The third theme, “embodied treatment: medications side effects as burdensome,” illustrated how the side effects of antipsychotic medications distorted the individual's perception of his or her body and how it compromised the ability to establish and maintain sexual relationships. The findings are important to mental health nurses because they highlight the need to be sensitive to how people with schizophrenia find meaning in their illness experience and to incorporate this knowledge into the care that they provide.