"My private theory is that it's all in the head": Understandings of chronic widespread pain among social workers from municipality job centers in Denmark

Rikke Schultz; Peter la Cour; Marius Brostrøm Kousgaard; Annette Sofie Davidsen

doi:10.1177/2055102921995367

"My private theory is that it's all in the head": Understandings of chronic widespread pain among social workers from municipality job centers in Denmark

Health Psychol Open. 2021 Feb 17;8(1):2055102921995367. doi: 10.1177/2055102921995367. eCollection 2021 Jan-Jun.

Authors

Rikke Schultz¹, Peter la Cour¹, Marius Brostrøm Kousgaard¹, Annette Sofie Davidsen¹

Affiliation

¹ The Research Unit for General Practice and Section of General Practice, Department of Public Health, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Abstract

People with chronic widespread pain (CWP) are often unfit for work, and consequently they are dependent on the municipality job center to receive social support and sickness benefits. The job center's case management is based on a social worker's assessment of the citizen's health condition. This qualitative study investigates social workers' understandings of CWP. Interviews were carried out with 12 social workers. The results showed that the participants predominantly experienced the citizens' illnesses as psychosocially mediated-referring to trauma, or a lack of meaning in the citizens' lives. Only a few participants mentioned possibilities for somatic explanations of CWP.

Keywords: chronic illness; community health psychology; interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA); pain; qualitative methods.