Parental narratives on children’s cardiac illness: The role of re-telling stories in teller’s psychological change

Illness narratives are the means by which a subjective experience of disease takes the form of a plot, in this way a patient’s experiences and "internal working model” of disease are communicated and made understandable to others. In particular, Pennebaker’s line of research emphasizes that re-writing or re-telling a story on traumatic experiences produces significant improvements in physical and mental health, because it helps the writers/tellers to make sense of events, provides meaning, as well as a transformation in the ways they are thinking themselves in relation to others. This poster examines, in sick children’s parents, changes resulting from re-building narratives on their children cardiac condition. Interviews were undertaken with three mothers and one father of three children with cardiac problems. For each parent the story of her/his child disease was collected three times with a lag of two days each. A content analysis of stories and linguistic analysis through software LIWC 2001 were developed. Changes determined by re-building of narratives consisted in an increase of reflections on past experience and a minor attention to the chronology of events, as well as a widening of the scenario of new characters. Linguistic analysis revealed that the last stories become richer as to cognitive mechanisms and affects than the first ones. The repetition of telling illness narratives allows parents to achieve greater awareness of their experience and emotional openness.