This study investigates understandings and experiences of headache in two regions of Peru: a semi-rural Quechua-speaking district of the Southern Peruvian highlands and a poor urban district of Lima. In particular, it explores the personal and collective meanings constructed around women's headache experiences. Both structured and open-ended interviews were administered to patients suffering headache to elicit interpretations of headache episodes. An analysis of the collected narratives suggests that headache is often comprehended in a polysemic framework, where shifting meanings ascribed in bodily, emotional, family and social terms articulate both individual and shared notions of suffering: loss of loved ones, inter-personal conflict, and tension associated to women's roles as homemakers are among the central themes evoked, and span through past, present and future domains. In particular, strains in family relationships, in dynamic interaction with larger contexts of social violence, play a prominent role in the configuration of headache, often experienced in conditions of solitude and isolation. Overall, this study underscores the significance of patients' subjective interpretations of painful experiences and emphasizes the manner through which bodily and emotional pain are inextricably linked to distress experienced at family and social levels.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.78346 |
| Date | January 2002 |
| Creators | Darghouth, Sarah |
| Contributors | Pedersen, Duncan (advisor), Bibeau, Gilles (advisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Science (Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 001974771, proquestno: AAIMQ88181, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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