Social withdrawal as a self-management behavior for migraine: implications for depression comorbidity among

Shawn M Kneipp1, Linda Beeber

  • 1School of Nursing, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Drs Kneipp and Beeber).

Disadvantaged women with migraine headaches have a particularly high risk of developing comorbid depression and often isolate themselves from others-or socially withdraw-to manage these disorders. Despite this, little is known about whether or how social withdrawal as a self-management strategy for episodic migraine might contribute to the more severe symptom burden in this group. In this article, we explore the potentially cumulative, deleterious effect that this strategy may have in modulating migraine-depression symptom severity in this population and argue that further theoretical and empirical work from nursing and complexity science perspectives is needed to better understand this phenomenon.

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