Abstract
Disorders of sex development (DSD) are a group of congenital medical conditions where reproductive organs and genitalia do not develop as expected. The reproductive organs and genitalia may be of the opposite sex, that is, not clearly male or female or a mixture of both. When a child is born with ambiguous genitalia, parents find this frustrating, confusing and unacceptable due to lack or little knowledge about the condition. Immediately after giving birth, parents are faced with problems of making decisions related to assigning the gender to the child. Parents are confused as to whether the gender that they chose for their child is the right one. The highest level of parents’ stress is related to emotional, behavioural and social adjustment to having a child with DSD. Throughout the child’s life, parents need to make decisions regarding socialisation, genital awareness, possible gender reassignment, surgeries and psychiatric presentations. There is a need of a wholistic management of parents and their adolescent boys who have DSD. The purpose of this research was to develop a model to assist psychiatric nurses to facilitate the mental health of parents and their adolescent boys who have DSD. To achieve this purpose, the following objectives were formulated: to explore and describe the experiences of parents and their adolescent boys who have DSD, to develop and describe and evaluate a model for the facilitation of mental health of parents and their adolescent boys who have DSD and to describe guidelines for the implementation of the model to facilitate the mental health of parents and their adolescent boys who have DSD. mobilise resources to facilitate the mental health of parents and their adolescent boys who have DSD. A qualitative, exploratory, descriptive, contextual and theory-generating research design was utilised. The four steps of model development were followed...
D.Cur. (Psychiatric Nursing)