The concerns of young stroke survivors are not well known. The aim of this paper is to draw on data from a larger study to show that young women who survived a hemorrhagic stroke desire access to peer support, but there is not widespread access to peer support. Open-ended interviews were conducted with an international sample of 28 women to learn about their poststroke experiences and were analyzed qualitatively for common issues and themes. A prominent theme across the interviews was the significance of age-similar peer support. Participants discussed feeling alone and misunderstood and wanting to have access to peer support. In conclusion, peer support may help to enhance psychological well-being, but the survivor’s own understanding of her peers must be centrally considered. 1. Introduction Although stroke is more common in old age, it is not unusual for a young person (under age 65) to have a stroke. Estimates of stroke incidence according to age vary, but it appears that approximately 30% of strokes occur in people under the age of 65, and 3-4% occur in people aged 40 or younger [1]. For people aged 20–44, an American study found an incidence rate of 23 per 100,000 per year [2]. Regarding stroke in children, estimated incidence rates vary between 1.5 and 5.1 per 100,000 per year [3]. Young people appear more likely than old people to have a hemorrhagic stroke [2, 4]—typically (but not always) caused by a ruptured aneurysm or arteriovenous malformation (AVM); and survivors of hemorrhagic stroke are likely to be left with residual impairments that are not immediately obvious [5]. For example, cognitive impairments are commonly found as a long-term consequence of stroke at a young age, although this remains an understudied topic [6]. Young survivors of stroke not only contravene popular ideas about stroke as a disease of old age, but they must often negotiate a social world in which there is little understanding that not all impairments are visible. This situation can create significant psychological distress. Researchers in the UK, for example, found in focus groups with young stroke survivors that they “bemoaned the widespread lack of awareness of stroke in younger people, reflected in poor service provision and general ignorance about the impairments that stroke leaves behind, which are often invisible or not easily comprehensible” [7]. These concerns about lack of awareness about stroke under age 65 and the invisibility of stroke-related impairments were also discussed in this author’s [8, 9] previous research on women who survived hemorrhagic
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