Expressive Writing in Kidney Transplant Patients

The expressive writing is a form of writing therapy developed primarily by James W. Pennebaker in the late 1980s consisting of writing about stressful and traumatic experience for 15-20 min for 3 consecutive days, including one's thoughts and feelings. The expressive writing allows people to express and process emotions, feelings, and thoughts related to the life events and consequent changes and this may favor a mental reorganization of the negative events, a greater expression and regulation of the emotions related to them. This intervention could provoke social, emotional, and consequently, psychophysical changes as is showed in patients with chronic diseases and cancer. In the present study, to all participants in the writing group, 5 days after the transplant, has been asked to write for 3 consecutive days, 20 minutes each days about their deepest emotions and feelings related to the chronic failure, the transplant and their expectations after that.

Five days after the transplant, to the control group participants has been asked to write for 3 consecutive days 20 minutes a day on an assigned neutral theme (eg. describe 1 object in the room) as objectively as possible, without mentioning their emotions or thoughts related to it.