Am I Sick or Not: Psychiatric Patients’ Approaches in Notifying Their Health Condition to The Medical Practitioners

Abstract

In the medical transaction between a patient and a medical practitioner, interpersonal communication will come in hand in order to help the medical practitioner to pre-diagnose the patient and identify the applicable medical solution. The qualitative study is conducted to determine how the psychiatric patients notify their health condition to the medical practitioners. The data for the entire research were obtained through in-depth interviews which were conducted with six informants. The informants were selected based on the typical sampling method, a subset of the purposive sampling with the traits of a psychiatric patient diagnosed with any psychiatric complication, have experienced any psychiatric disorder’s symptoms, have first-hand experienced in the medical interaction with the medical practitioners, was or still undergoing psychiatric treatment process, regardless of age, gender, ethnicity, socio economic status and educational background. The data were analysed by utilizing the thematic analysis, hence deriving themes from the in-depth interviews. In terms of the patients’ notification of their health condition, the data derived from the informants have contributed the themes of- i) hallucination and disturbance, ii) disordered speech, iii) one way interaction, iv) repetition, v) background information, vi) problems with medication, vii) easy to cry, viii) problems at home, ix) health problems and x) confuse with health condition. Finally, the researcher has concluded that the medical practitioners were unable to deliver during the medical interactions due to their unawareness of the actual situations experienced by the patients. Therefore, the medical practitioners were incapable of accommodating the patients inability in understanding the essence of the medical interactions occurred between them. The researcher hopes that this research can help to develop the awareness of the medical practitioners in understanding the concept of accommodating the communicative differences between patients and the medical practitioners.