RHP&EO is the electronic journal of the International Union for Health Promotion and Education

Who talks to family and friends about joys and sorrows?

Sogaard, Anne Johanne & Fonnebo, Vinjar

Institute of Community Medicine, University of Tromso, 9011 Tromso, Norway

Church membership, close friends and a supporting social network are factors shown to prevent disease and early death. We do' not know, however, through which mechanisms these factors may protect the individuals involved. One possible way is through communication. In psychiatry communication is an accepted therapeutic method to change people's thinking and action. In health promotion we believe involvement, communication and participation to be important factors in creating individual and community changes to the benefit of people's health.

Purpose: To study the determinants of communication about joys and sorrows -particularly whether or not such communication is associated with self-reported mental distress.

Material and methods: 22 942 subjects were invited to the third Finnmark Heart Study in 1987/88 - i.e. all residents aged 40-62 years and a random 10% sample of individuals 20-39 years. In addition to physiological measurements, the attendees filled in three questionnaires - among other things asking for demographic characteristics, communication patterns regarding joys and sorrows and five questions about mental distress - inability to cope, dissatisfaction with life, loneliness, depression and insomnia. Whereas 84.4% attended the screening, about 60% answered all the questions analysed in this paper.

Results: 80.8% of the women and 65.2% of the men (p<0.001) reported to have talked to a family-member and/or a friend about joys and sorrows during the last two weeks. Individuals with a high educational level and those reporting to be separated, divorced or widow(er) communicated the most. A weak positive association was found between communication and symptoms of mental distress. An interaction was detected between communication, mental distress and educational attainment: those with high educational level talked to family and friends about joys and sorrows independently of level of mental distress - whereas the lowest educated individuals talked more if they also reported symptoms of mental distress.

Conclusion: Educational level is strongly associated with communication-whereas mental distress is weakly associated. Further study is needed to explore whether more communication about and attention upon health problems may cause higher pressure on the professional health care system.

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