Mondha Kengganpanich. Mothers' experience with down syndrome's child : social suffering, context, meaning and management . Doctoral Degree(Medical and Health Social Sciences). Mahidol University. : Mahidol University, 2004.
Mothers' experience with down syndrome's child : social suffering, context, meaning and management
Abstract:
Mothers' Experience with down syndrome’s child was studied to understand social
suffering, context, and meaning and management of the suffering with the concept of Critical
Medical Anthropology (CMA). The qualitative research design was operated with in-depth interview
technique and observation of 18 poor mothers and 4 comparative mothers from 11 slums in Bangkok
and 4 peripheral provinces. The result reveals the political ecology of poor down syndrome child
mothers who lived in a vicious life cycle and social disparity according to the following
compositions: agricultural occupation, poor economic status, rural-urban migration, separated
family, domestic violence, sexual abuse, limitation in work opportunity, and unstable and insecure
shanty. The family sphere of political ecology widens for the women whose background of husbands
are the same. The grounded social disparity has effects on social suffering experience which is
produced by the medical power such as communication problem between medical personnel and
poor down syndrome child mother which is medically oriented, the difficulty of medical information
and inaccessibility of the poor and medical moral problem of time and space of informing bad news
including worthless judgment of down syndrome as abnormality. Moreover, the discriminating
service such as the complexity of medical process with double standard to abnormality and poverty,
the medical enormity, and operational ordering to the poor as the last were double stardards that
effecting to have more suffering . Both social and cultural structure have an effect on social
suffering. Firstly, the structural violence is composed of sexual violence both to womanhood and
abnormality such as religious and social rules controlling and dominating the social life of women,
social rule of birth control on women body within patriarchy, and operation of normative standard to
abnormality; Secondly, the poverty is comprised with classification and the lack of assurance which
are inaccessibility to social service and social welfare both of health and education. The result shows
the different suffering management according to different meaning of having down syndrome child
in each period of life experience. The different meanings are mental retardation, physical and
intellectual disability, disease, slow development, incarnated disease, and genetic disease. Such
meanings have influences on the following different managements: seeking information, dependence
on medicine, religious and belief dependence, diluting the others, shifting from negative to positive
meaning and from suffering to happiness. Finally, the results of the study come up with the
recommendations to the prenatal system especially for the poor risk mothers such as the potential
development of health care delivery, information development system, communication system and
community participation, coverage health insurance, the medical personnel production's system,
social welfare, environment support, and empowerment of the down syndrome mothers' group.