OBJECTIVE Coronary heart disease (CHD) is a leading cause of illness and death in Western society. The present study was designed to evaluate the utility of illness perceptions and medication beliefs in predicting secondary preventive behaviour among patients with CHD. An extended version of Leventhal's self-regulatory model (SRM) was used as a theoretical framework for this study [Leventhal H,...

The objectives of this study were to identify predominant themes in religion, illness and death in the life histories of families and examine the relationship between religion creeds, illness and death in the discourse of families that have an ill person. The theoretical framework used in this study was Symbolic Interactionism and the method was Oral History. Participants were seventeen familie...

Perceived legitimacy of discrimination shapes reactions to mental illness stigma among stigmatized individuals. We assessed deliberately endorsed versus automatic shame-related reactions to mental illness as predictors of change in perceived legitimacy of discrimination over six months among 75 people with mental illness. Automatically activated shame-related associations with mental illness we...

Discovering causal relationships is a hard task, often hindered by the need for intervention, and often requiring large amounts of data to resolve statistical uncertainty. However, humans quickly arrive at useful causal relationships. One possible reason is that humans extrapolate from past experience to new, unseen situations: that is, they encode beliefs over causal invariances, allowing for ...

BACKGROUND Interest in self-care haemodialysis (HD) has increased because it improves patients'clinical and quality-of-life outcomes. Patients who undertake self-management for haemodialysis may hold illness beliefs differently to those choosing institutional care at the time of making the modality choice or moulded by their illness and dialysis treatment experience. Illness perceptions amongst...

BACKGROUND Detection of depression can be difficult in primary care, particularly when associated with chronic illness. Patient beliefs may affect detection and subsequent engagement with management. We explored patient beliefs about the nature of depression associated with physical illness. METHODS A qualitative interview study of patients registered with general practices in Leeds, UK. We i...

Background: Paranormal beliefs are common among patients with mental illness. Such beliefs may mediate conceptualization of illness, treatment satisfaction and medication adherence. Objective: To study the level of paranormal beliefs and its relationship with explanatory models, treatment adherence and satisfaction using standardized assessment tool. Methods: Eighty nine patients with mental il...

This article discusses the results of a study on beliefs on coping with illness and coping with the health care system. Using the concept mapping method, members of patient organizations (n = 172) sorted their beliefs on coping with illness and coping with the health care system into two dimensions (priority and content). Statistical analysis reveals eight beliefs on coping with illness, with "...