Coping with cancer: the mind/mood connection
by Mira and Charles on August 30th, 2010Emotional and psychological secrets for dealing with cancer
We’ve been getting a lot of requests for interviews lately, and the latest was based on our book Feel Better Fast. This book gives you everything you need to understand the ways illness or injury affects you emotionally. Even more important, it shows you how to deal effectively with anger, depression, anxiety, and stress to not only feel better but, in many cases, actually get better faster. This book was the pioneering effort at what is now called personal medicine, or whole person medicine: the idea that you and your health-care providers should make sure to integrate your thoughts and feelings as an essential part of your treatment. It’s been getting a lot of attention, including last Friday with this interview about the whole person approach to dealing with cancer.
1. How does receiving psychological treatment enhance or improve patients’ probability of beating a disease for good? How does it help them to cope better if they are rediagnosed?
CHI: Psychological treatment can significantly improve a patient’s likelihood of recovering from cancer and of managing symptoms while under treatment. Let me make one thing clear: the mind cannot cure the body. There are no mind/body techniques that have any direct effect on cancer. You cannot think yourself well. But psychological treatment can reduce depression, anxiety, stress, and anger (which is wonderful in itself), and that can make the patient much more effective consumer of medical services. And we know that patients who are more actively and effectively involved in their treatment get better care and have better results. With many diagnoses, lowered stress is associated better outcomes.
2. How can the emotional distress from a cancer diagnosis or the process of eradicating cancer manifest as patients work to move on with their lives?
CHI: The effects of a cancer diagnosis on the emotions is deep and complex. It begins with fear. Not just fear of death, although that is a huge issue. But there is also fear of losing control, fear of pain, fear of bodily changes, fear of making the wrong decision, fear of having to deal with doctors and hospitals. And it’s not just fear. There is also depression. One is confronted with mythology about “battling” cancer, but in fact there are no battles. One just undergoes treatments that typically make one feel quite helpless. And that’s depressing! There is stress: one worries and frets about what will happen and if one is making the right decisions. And there is anger. The majority of cancer patients are angry with their doctors or some other aspect of the health-care system. This is inevitable when you have busy doctors and other personnel dealing with what is routine for them, while for the patient this is the most terrifying and overwhelming experience of their lives.
These emotions manifest in every way imaginable. From putting on a false front of bravery to hostility to emotional paralysis. Everything that goes on in the mind and mood of a cancer patient can be assumed to be a reaction to the cancer and the treatment.
3. What are some of the emotional and psychological issues patients experience when faced with a chronic or debilitating disease like cancer?
CHI: It’s best to think of these issues in the form of questions: Will I live? Will I be intact? Will my life be ruined? What will happen to my family? Will my family be there for me? Will there be pain? How will I handle the pain? Can I trust my doctors? How will I pay for all of this? How will I make up for the lost income? How do I cope with all the uncertainty? These are the most common questions, and each one is an issue with grave emotional and psychological consequences.
4. What additional or aggravated challenges could patients face if they don’t receive psychological therapy while they’re receiving physical treatment for their cancer?
CHI: The most serious risk is suicide. The more serious the cancer, the greater the risk of suicide. The next most serious risk is being unwilling or unable to participate effectively in treatment, leading to either lack of treatment or to ineffective treatment. Next comes severe emotional pain, along with alienation of family and friends. I’ve seen cases where the patient’s emotional reaction to her illness drives away the very people she needs for support, which in turn makes the emotional pain even worse.
5. Have you seen a trend in medical professionals recommending emotional or psychological therapy for cancer patients?
CHI: The trend toward recommending therapy for cancer patients is up, but seeing the patient as a whole person with necessarily an important psychological and emotional component is still too rare.
6. In your personal opinion, do you think psychological therapy should be a standard part of cancer treatment?
CHI: Psychological treatment should be a standard part of cancer care. Patients will generally try to live up to media images of the way they are supposed to behave. There will be little support for deviating from those images. And those images are all about the brave fighter with a positive attitude. But that is not how most people feel inside. They need therapy to help them deal with something that is almost certainly overwhelming their ability to cope psychologically. There is a desperate need to acknowledge, understand, and deal with the real inner life of patients.
Well, that’s the interview. If you are dealing with cancer or any other serious illness, please get a hold of Feel Better Fast. It can make a huge difference. Sometimes it can make all the difference.
Also you will find help and inspiration in The Emotional Energy Factor. There you will find all kinds of insights into what works to start feeling up when something in your life is getting you down.
Finally, if you are dealing with something really rough, it helps enormously to have a sense of meaning connected to what is happening to you. Everything Happen for a Reason is a path-breaking work at giving substance to something we all feel is true: there is a reason for what happens to us, but what is that reason? Everything Happen for a Reason will help you discover what the reason is in your case.
