Authors

• Aaltonen, Heini (University of Helsinki)

Keywords

diseases, fatigue (Physiology), medical diagnosis, social security

Abstract

The data consists of writings in which people with fatigue syndrome talk about their experiences of applying for social security benefits. The data was originally collected for a Master's thesis in social work.

In the writing call, people with ME/CFS were asked to write about their experiences of applying for social security benefits if they had had difficulties in getting the benefit they had applied for or had been refused it. The call for contributions included a number of questions to help with the writing process. These provided the opportunity to describe, for example, how the difficulty or refusal of benefit has affected the respondent's life and well-being, the emotions that the situation has caused, or the support and help that the respondent has received from different sources in applying for benefit.

As background information, respondents were asked about their main source of income, the duration and severity of their illness, and whether they had a diagnosis of fatigue syndrome. The data were organised into an easy to use HTML version at FSD.