Heart attack patients can suffer substantial emotional trauma after treatment, and showing kindness may help them find their way back to emotional wellbeing, a study has found.
\nThe emotional whiplash can range from phobia about moving in case their heart rate rises, to difficulty accepting a new identity as someone with a serious health condition, according to a study published in the journal Qualitative Research in Sport, Exercise and Health.<\/p>\n
The study found emotional trauma following a heart attack was more common in men who saw themselves as alpha males who, after becoming a heart patient, saw themselves as the runt in the litter, weak and likely to be ‘picked off’ by life and other people.<\/p>\n
The research by Samantha Meredith, a PhD student University of Portsmouth in the UK, found cardiac rehabilitation played a huge role in helping people find their way back to emotional wellbeing.<\/p>\n
The study examines cardiac patients navigating shock and grief, including depression, feelings of loss of control, and a disruption to their understanding of who they thought they were.”We saw substantial emotional trauma following a cardiac event, including ‘cardiophobia’, the fear of elevated heart rate or doing anything strenuous,” said Meredith.<\/p>\n
“Cardiac patients need better support in terms of counselling, identity support, social support and emotionally intelligent care to help them find their feet again, following a traumatic experience,” she said.Previous research has shown that not being able to accept a serious health experience or a new identity as someone with a life-changing condition can influence the clinical outcomes for a patient.<\/p>\n
“For many, their ability or inability to manage and accept this experience and their ‘new’ identity as a patient influenced their clinical outcomes, underlining why it’s so important patients are helped to rebuild emotionally as well as physically,” she said.<\/p>\n
The support for patients in the study included kindness and warmth from nurses and physiotherapists that patients at a cardiac rehabilitation centre.The study reports the findings as three fictional stories based on the most common types of emotional trauma seen in cardiac patients over a year.The most common ‘patient’ was an alpha male unable to accept that they were now vulnerable, and or who rejected their ‘useless’ heart, and avoided engaging with the cardiac referral.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Heart attack patients can suffer substantial emotional trauma after treatment, and showing kindness may help them find their way back to emotional wellbeing, a study has found. The emotional whiplash can range from phobia about moving in case their heart rate rises, to difficulty accepting a new identity as someone with a serious health condition, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":52050,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52049","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52049","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52049"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52049\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52051,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52049\/revisions\/52051"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52050"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52049"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52049"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52049"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}