The Nature of Power Experienced by Individuals Manifesting Patterning Labeled Schizophrenic: An Investigation of the Principle of Helicy

Abstract

The nature of power experienced by individuals labeled 'chronic schizophrenic' was ascertained through hermeneutic analysis and further validated through multiple triangulation.

The central themes that emerged from text were integrality and awareness. The structure of power to respondents was determined to involve integrality and awareness in addition to a wide range of themes regarding choices, freedom to act intentionally, and involvement in creating changes, field behaviors identified by Barrett (1983) as constituting power. Informants who viewed their integrality as a process, who recognized the advantages and limitations imposed by living in the world, and who made choices with regard to others and did so freely were more powerful than those informants who viewed integrality as a product, who did not recognize the nature of the context in which they live, and whose choices were more limited to things they did for themselves in order to get along. None of the informants in the study was able to clearly describe the nature of his or her involvement in creating changes. Neither did assumptions that structured informants' schizophrenia as an illness seem clear to them.

Emergent implications for nursing include nurses' recognition of nursing's own contextually-grounded evolution; transcendence of the prevailing world-view in description of schizophrenic experience; and acceptance of schizophrenic experience as evolutionary rather than regressive.