입원경험이 정신과적 증상의 인식에 미치는 영향

The Influence on Concept of Psychiatric Symptoms From Hospitalization Experience

The ability to recognize the symptom as illness is essential not only in deciding the necessity for a psychiatric treatment but also for its effect on the continuation of the therapy as an outpatient. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to evaluate the extent that patients and their guardians recognized the psychiatric symptom as ilness and the influence which the hospitalization experience exerted on such psychiatric symptom recognition. The subjects of this study consisted of the patients and their guardians who had been admitted to the psychiatric department of Kyungpook national university Hospital in Taegu from April 1986 to July 1987. From each of the two groups, 120 subjects were selected respectively and, in addition, another 120 subjects were also selected from the student’ s guardians for the purpose of this study. As for the measure for this study, the self-report form questionnaire was prepared by selecting items with high face validity from the existing scales related to each ten psychiatric symptoms. Every subjects were instructed to evaluate the degree of illness for each respective symptoms. The results were as follows : First, there were statistically sifnificant differences between the patient’ s guardians and the student’ s guardians in the extent that each symptomatic behavior was recognized as psychiatric disorder. Second, however, no statistically significant difference was found for symptoms of hypochondriasis and persecutory ideation between the patient’ s guardians and the student’ s guardians. Third, through hospitalization experience, the patients showed improvement in their ability to recongnize the symptomatic behavior as illness and to evaluate items of normal as normal. However, the improvement was not statistically significant. Fourth, only in hostility, statistically significant improvement in symptom recognition was found in the patients or the psychotic patients through hospitalization experience. Fifth, the psychiatric treatment of the patients had no effect on the symptom recognition of their guardians.