To increase youth participation in screening programs, it will be necessary to address their concerns, dispel misconceptions, and provide more information about chlamydia. A home Chlamydia test might be one way to increase screening.
In psychological, psychiatric, and pediatric literature of the past several decades, there has been considerable attention given to the psychological needs of the ill child. Until very recently, the major theoretical format for understanding and intervening in the behavior of sick children has been psychoanalysis. A number of studies, both clinical and empirical, have addressed children's responses to illness and/or hospitalization in terms of the feelings of the child. The psychic and physical trauma experienced by the sick child were seen to result in feelings of fear, anger, anxiety, withdrawal, and depression. Thus, therapeutic interventions were best directed to the affective leveltoward acknowledging and modifying these negative feelings.But, even within the psychoanalytic orientation, it became obvious that the feelings of the sick child or adult were related to beliefs or concepts about illness-that is,, to the way the patient understood illness at a cognitive level. For example, much of the depression and withdrawal of the hospitalized child was presumed to be related to the child's belief that he or she was being punished for wrongdoing or was to blame -was at fault -for the illness being contracted. The negative affect or feeling was in some way seen to be related to the child's cognition or understanding of the causes of the illness.
This study examines the development of children's concepts of illness in light of Piaget's and Werner's findings regarding the ontogenesis of causal relations. Six developmentally ordered categories of explanation of illness have been articulated. These catagories, which are consistent with Piaget's three major stages of cognitive development, can be useful to pediatricians (1) in explaining illness and providing "reassurance" to children, (2) in developing meaningful health education strategies, and (3) in responding to the degree of control the child feels over the illness.
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