Cognitive and Emotional Adaptation to Mental Disease Within Family

Abstract

This paper is aiming at an analysis of some aspects of the process of cognitive and emotional adaptation to the situation of mental illness within family. There have been observed mutual relations between the abovementioned aspects. The significant component of the cognitive adaptation process is the construction of categories of mental disease and mental health, which constitute the frames of interpretation of one’s experience. This process depends on one’s affective states and influences further emotional condition, which provides feedback to cognitive processes at more advanced stages. Theoretical and methodological frameworks of this paper are based on the constructionist paradigm. The empirical research has been carried out according to the grounded theory assumptions. The research material consists of intentionally constructed and published (in a book and online) biographical narrations of mentally ill persons’ family members. The analysis of the abovementioned narrations is focused on the content, as well as on the forms of descriptions constructed by the relatives of the mentally ill persons. According to the presented analysis, the process of adaptation to the situation of mental illness within family, with its variations, stages, and turning points, has been reconstructed.