Fatigue and relatedness experiences of inordinately tired women.
OBJECTIVE
To examine the association of fatigue and interpersonal relatedness of fatigued women.


METHODS
Hermeneutics.


METHODS
Seventeen fatigued American women, recruited through purposive sampling, were interviewed. Questions were based on data from previous research of women's fatigue and on characteristics of the theory of relatedness.


RESULTS
Relatedness was significantly linked to fatigue. Participants moved toward disconnectedness, parallelism, comfortable noninvolvement, or through enmeshment and then toward parallelism. A spiral of intrapersonal and interpersonal changes, sense of emotional absence, lack of energy and motivation, and depression-like symptoms were reported by fatigued participants, particularly those whose state of relatedness shifted toward disconnectedness. Depression-like symptoms were associated with fatigue, but were differentiated from diagnosed depression. Participants noted that physical movement was helpful to them in mediating their fatigue.


CONCLUSIONS
Findings from this study indicate the need for a database to describe the interplay among biological, psychosocial, and behavioral components of fatigue and to clarify its association with medical diagnoses, particularly depression.
Dzurec
L C
LC
School of Nursing, University of Connecticut, 231 Glenbrook Road, U-26, Storrs, CT 06269-2026, USA. laura.dzurec@uconn.edu
D000328:Adult; D003863:Depression; D005221:Fatigue; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008875:Middle Aged; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D016387:Women's Health