Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

Critical Illness Survivors’ Perceptions Of Their Recovery: An Interpretive Phenomenological Inquiry, Kelly Calkins

Theses and Dissertations

Surviving critical illness with its physical, cognitive, and psychosocial morbidities is a growing clinical and research challenge and an important public health concern. Currently, there are few interventions for survivors of critical illness after hospital discharge. Potential interventions include rehabilitation services, Intensive Care Unit (ICU) diaries and ICU follow-up clinics, however, most survivors do not have access to these post-hospital interventions.

The purpose of this study is to gain a better understanding of how critical illness survivors experience their recovery, interventions they use, and what they perceive as facilitators and barriers to their recovery. A better understanding of these factors, …

The Influence Of Therapist-Patient Religious/Spiritual Congruence On Satisfaction With Therapy: A Review Of Research, Tammy E. Henderson

Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this review was to examine the relationship between mental health and religion and/or spirituality. Specifically, it was believed that religion and spiritual congruence had a positive influence on satisfaction with therapy. Indeed, the literature reviewed suggests that therapists should be more open to addressing a patient's religious and/or spiritual beliefs as it could lead to more attuned therapeutic sessions. The importance of congruence between patient and therapist is a factor that can impact the therapeutic alliance, based on the literature, this concept appears to hold true for those that are or are not religiously and/or spiritually inclined.

Anxious?: Re-Designing Women’S Jewelry To Help Manage Symptoms Of Anxiety Disorders, Nourbanu Feras Hijazi

Theses and Dissertations

Anxiety is a common and often stigmatized condition. Destigmatizing mental disorders can positively impact people’s interaction and communication with others and can prompt conversations in which people share their experiences with mental health, leading to improved societal understanding and perception.

My design solution tackles behavioral symptoms of anxiety, specifically two conditions that fall under obsessive-compulsive behavior: Dermatillomania and Trichotillomania. By redesigning women’s jewelry to specialized accessories, my intention is for these objects to help destigmatize these conditions and relieve symptoms of maladaptive behaviors and hurtful impulses. By redirecting these irresistible urges to an external artifact, the objects are designed to …

Penalized Mixed-Effects Ordinal Response Models For High-Dimensional Genomic Data In Twins And Families, Amanda E. Gentry

Theses and Dissertations

The Brisbane Longitudinal Twin Study (BLTS) was being conducted in Australia and was funded by the US National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA). Adolescent twins were sampled as a part of this study and surveyed about their substance use as part of the Pathways to Cannabis Use, Abuse and Dependence project. The methods developed in this dissertation were designed for the purpose of analyzing a subset of the Pathways data that includes demographics, cannabis use metrics, personality measures, and imputed genotypes (SNPs) for 493 complete twin pairs (986 subjects.) The primary goal was to determine what combination of SNPs and …

Shared Genetic And Environmental Influences On Fear, Anxiety, Posttraumatic Stress, And Brain Morphometry, Chelsea Sawyers

Theses and Dissertations

Anxiety disorders (ADs) and stress-related disorders are some of the most common psychiatric disorders in the United States. Like other c0mplex psychiatric illness, genetics and neuroimaging research has focused on understanding their underlying neurobiology. Areas within the fear-network play important roles in threat perception, fear conditioning/learning, cognitive processing, and modulation of fear responses including contextual modulation and extinction and have been implicated in ADs as well as stress disorders such as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The primary gap in the current search for underlying biological mechanisms is in whether biomarkers associated with disorders share genetic influences with the disorders they …