23-5 How Seizure Attacks Influence Teenagers’ Process of Coping with Interpersonal  Relationships in School

The purposes of this study were to understand how seizure attacks influence epileptic teenagers’ coping process with interpersonal relationships in school. This was a qualitative study, data were collected by in-depth interviews with four epileptic teenagers. The interviews were all taped and transcribed, and the recorded transcripts and notes taken from the interviews were further analyzed according to the template analysis style. The findings of this study were that the coping process of epileptic teenagers can be analyzed in five stages: the time preceding school, daily life in junior high school before the attack, the period during seizure attacks, the period after seizure attack, and the time when patient’s condition was stable. The factors that have a major impact on the coping process are: characteristic of seizure attack, the view of the disease by epileptic teenagers, the view of interpersonal anticipation by epileptic teenagers, the view of epilepsy by schoolmates, responses to interpersonal change, responses to questions from other people, and impetus to prevention education. Furthermore, this study provided some suggestions for the future development on approaching counseling practices and mentoring in the school and the concepts raised in this paper could be used as fundamental material for future research.

Keywords
coping process, epileptic teenagers, interpersonal relationship,  qualitative research, seizure attack.

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