Adolescents\' experience of a parental traumatic brain injury
Abstract
This study explores the experiences of four adolescents, each living with a parent who has sustained a traumatic brain injury, against the theoretical backdrop of existential-phenomenological psychology. In-depth interviews were conducted and analysed within the context of the existential phenomenology, in an attempt to gain a deep understanding of the psychologically complex themes and patterns embedded in the experience. The phenomenon of parental traumatic brain injury was characterised by denial, anger, grief, guilt, anxiety, over-protectiveness, social isolation, and change in many areas of the participants' lives. The adolescents coped using both approaches and avoidance styles of coping. Religion was a theme in the lives of all four adolescents. Despite the professed negative impact of the experience of having a traumatically brain-injured parent, the adolescents in the current study managed to find some degree of positive meaning in having to cope with such a traumatic event and its consequences. The results are interpreted within an existential-phenomenological psychology framework.
Keywords: traumatic brain injury; consequences; family; adolescence; phenomenology; coping
Health SA Gesondheid Vol. 11 (4) 2006: pp. 46-56
The author(s) retain copyright on work published by AOSIS unless specified otherwise.
Licensing and publication rights
Author(s) of work published by AOSIS are required to grant AOSIS the unlimited rights to publish the definitive work in any format, language and medium, for any lawful purpose. AOSIS requires journal authors to publish their work in open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
The authors retain the non-exclusive right to do anything they wish with the published article(s), provided attribution is given to the applicable journal with details of the original publication, as set out in the official citation of the article published in the journal. The retained right specifically includes the right to post the article on the authors’ or their institution’s websites or in institutional repositories.
Previously published work may have been published under a different licence. We advise the community that if they would like to reuse the work to consult the applicable licence at article level.
Note: If you need to comply with your funding body policy, you can apply for the CC BY license after your manuscript is accepted for publication.