Relationship between depersonalization and eating disorders among Japanese nurses
Year: 2009
Type: article
Study design: Observational Study
Abstract: Among nurses, depersonalization symptoms are serious mental problems which may prevent them from accomplishing their work and may cause medical errors. Therefore, it is important to detect de-personalization among nurses and to give care when it is found. However, depersonalization sym-ptoms are subjectively experienced and recognizing them can be di‹cult for both the person who ex-periences them and others. Moreover, depersonalization often appears with other disorders, which make it much more di‹cult to detect. Eating disorder is a condition which mostly appears in women and it has been pointed out that psychological stress is one of the inducing factors. Therefore, eating disorder may also be one of the problems that needs to be solved among nurses. We observed some cases in which depersonalization symptoms were closely related to the onset of eating disorder. However, there are no studies which describe this relationship among nurses. Firstly, this paper, we present our cases and discuss the relationship between eating disorders and deper-sonalization symptoms (Study 1). Secondly, we examine the relationship between eating disorder and depersonalization, empirically (Study 2). Study 1 showed the possibility that abnormal eating behavior may be an attempt to cope with sym-ptoms of depersonalization. Study 2 showed that there was a relationship between possible eating disorders and the depersonalization at clinical level (x2＝7.09, p＜0.05), and all symptoms of deper-sonalization in individuals who had a possible eating disorder were signiˆcantly higher than those in individuals without it (p＜.001.05). The results indicate that when we ˆnd a eating disorder or abnormal eating behavior in nurses, it is recommended to check about depersonalization.
Authors: Miyuki Sugiura, Masataka Hirosawa, Motoki Mizuno, Yasuyuki YAMADA, S. Tanaka, Aya Okada
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W244155655