Varför och hur söker människor psykoterapi? Upplevelser av skäl och sökprocess hos panikångestpatienter

Sammanfattning: People generally follow a similar process when seeking professional care. Experience of what reasons they have for actually seeking help and their considerations during the process before they make the decision to seek help is, however, insufficiently researched. Hence, it is important to study this in order to find out people's experience of what reasons and considerations they have during the process leading up to this decision. This is done through a qualitative study of 32 transcribed interviews of respondents with panic disorder. The interviews are part of the material of a larger study about panic disorder made at Lund University, the POSE project. The 32 interviews are a randomized sample of the 221 patients included in the POSE project. The respondents in the project are between 18 and 70 years old. The interviews are the POSE project's six-month follow-up and are semi-structured. The survey is conducted using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis to find out the respondents' experiences of their reasons for seeking help and how they experienced the process. Through coding in the research program NVivo, codes were generated which then in their turn generated overall themes. These codes and themes showed that people realize that the disease impact their life, and that the intrusive and stressful expressions of symptoms influence people to seek professional care. Experience of having an inherent desire to change one's life, to have received support or been given advice in some form, previously had professional care or counseling, or conducted own research regarding the diagnosis and care alternatives, all influenced the search process. The importance of understanding the reasons people have for seeking help should not be underestimated as this does not always correlate with the causes for their help-seeking. Understanding the reasons for clients’ help-seeking can facilitate designing treatment plans, improve alliance and keep clients in treatment.