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Perceptions of illness can reflect cultural beliefs or psychological needs and are subjective. Understanding a patient’s perception aids in diagnosis, and reducing illness perception to basic elements helps patients describe what they feel. These elements include identity, cause, timeline, consequences, and care-control.
Few people manage to go through life without getting sick. Many illnesses are short-lived and really nothing to worry about, while others are serious and have long-lasting effects. The disease itself is not related to perception; can be pathologically identified objectively. It is important to recognize, however, that how an individual perceives physical or emotional distress is not easily measurable. Perceptions of illness might reflect cultural beliefs, psychological needs, or something else that might have little to do with measurable illness.
An understanding of a patient’s perception of the disease is necessary to aid in diagnosis. This can be difficult because perception is highly subjective and there is no absolute method for measuring it, either from individual to individual, or within one person’s perspective over time. Researchers have determined that reducing illness perception to its most basic elements can help patients describe what they feel. By organizing these components into a structure, patients can reconstruct the architecture of their beliefs about their illnesses.
The first area of concern is identity. This component contains what the patient believes to be true about the disease, including cause and symptoms. A patient who lists a set of experiences such as confusion, nausea, and anxiety as symptomatic of a particular illness may be more likely to experience those symptoms while simultaneously failing to recognize others who are equally likely to be part of the cluster.
The causal element indicates what the patient believes was the trigger. For example, some diseases are genetic, while others are triggered by a virus. Other causes that patients might identify include allergic responses to the environment, emotional distress, or physical harm. The cause may have social or cultural contexts; some patients are more willing to accept a cause of illness or spiritual imbalance, for example, than others.
The sense of the patient’s timeline describes the third component. This area concerns the initial appearance of the perceived disease, its trajectory and its conclusion. Patients with illness perceptions that an illness is or will become chronic are less likely to recover quickly than those who believe it is temporary.
The fourth area of concern is consequences. Patients whose perception of the disease leads them to believe it will have a profound and negative effect on quality of life are more likely to become discouraged or depressed than those who do not have this particular perception. Patients who, in fact, have a severe disorder but lack a strong sense of the consequences may be better able to combat it or less equipped to manage its effects.
The last category is care-control. This element of illness perception concerns the degree to which the patient believes that a cure is possible. This can range from a completely negative position where there is no hope of a cure to a completely positive position where the patient firmly believes that a cure will be found.
