Related Experiment Videos
Fatigue and relatedness experiences of inordinately tired women
1School of Nursing, University of Connecticut, 231 Glenbrook Road, U-26, Storrs, CT 06269-2026, USA. laura.dzurec@uconn.edu
Purpose:
To examine the association of fatigue and interpersonal relatedness of fatigued women.
Design:
Hermeneutics.
Methods:
Seventeen fatigued American women, recruited through purposive sampling, were interviewed. Questions were based on data from previous research of women's fatigue and on characteristics of the theory of relatedness.
Findings:
Relatedness was significantly linked to fatigue. Participants moved toward disconnectedness, parallelism, comfortable noninvolvement, or through enmeshment and then toward parallelism. A spiral of intrapersonal and interpersonal changes, sense of emotional absence, lack of energy and motivation, and depression-like symptoms were reported by fatigued participants, particularly those whose state of relatedness shifted toward disconnectedness. Depression-like symptoms were associated with fatigue, but were differentiated from diagnosed depression. Participants noted that physical movement was helpful to them in mediating their fatigue.
Conclusions:
Findings from this study indicate the need for a database to describe the interplay among biological, psychosocial, and behavioral components of fatigue and to clarify its association with medical diagnoses, particularly depression.