Conference Proceedings - School of Nursing & Midwifery - Trinity ...

School of Nursing & Midwifery, Trinity College Dublin: 8 th Annual Interdisciplinary Research Conference
Transforming Healthcare Through Research, Education & Technology: 7 th – 9 th November 2007
Conference Proceedings
focussed on issues of mental health and how people manage to deal
with life issues ‘coping strategies can come into it. Some people
just can’t cry and they cut themselves … and they can go through
that for many years without anybody knowing even’ (female mental
health).
Towards the end of the session when respondents were asked to
sum up their responses to health, one female student commented
‘… people are losing coping skills; they’re losing everything else,
they’re just reaching out for therapy as their first solution. They’re
not trying to adapt and cope by themselves; they’re just going to
the psychiatrist first and they’re not trying any more’ (female
general). While for another female respondent ill health was ‘when
they can’t cope with their illness any more, … if they have the
coping skills to overcome it …you can’t really say that person in not
healthy … and if you haven’t got a lot of coping skills that will
impinge on your health and how you cope with it’ (mental health).
Happiness was something that our respondents thought would be
an important element in health with one respondent suggesting
‘hav[ing] a happy life –that’s my definition of a healthy man’ (male
mental health). From this statement general agreement ensued
and the sample were then spontaneously given the following
example and asked for their comments.
Researcher; Do you think, for example, to give an extreme
example – someone you would see in an inner city, lying in a side
street drinking out of a bottle of cheap cider maybe, and maybe
fairly unkempt, but he’s there and he seems pretty happy with his
situation – would you say he’s healthy?
Animated discussion occurred but the general agreement was that
‘if he’s happy within himself, he might have no worries or anything,
he might enjoy that life if he’s happy within himself’ (female general
nursing), while a male retorted ‘[that] if he’s causing no bother and
he’s there, maybe if he’s happy that way. That’s his own life and
we can’t stop him, it will affect him in the long term physically but
at the moment …’ (mental health). Another comment related to
notions of norms of behaviour as linked to health ‘Well, if I went out
and done something extreme but it was what I wanted to do –
someone would say, ‘She’s mad in the head for doing that there’ – I
might think I was happy’ (female general nursing). Overall there
are a number of themes emerging from the foregoing discussion.
While happiness is viewed as an important element of well-being
there were concerns for how present activities, which may seem
rather more or less harmless in the present tense, could have long
term consequences. The sample was very clear that the individual’s
reasons behind these types of actions, street drinking, were an
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