What Is Psycho-Oncology?
Cancer is a traumatic and stressful event for the persons who receive such diagnosis (Grassi et al., 2003). It strongly exacerbates out concerns of illness, threat, and death and interferes with all the physical, psychological, spiritual, existential, and relational dimensions that characterize the human being (Grassi, 2006).
On a physical level, the effects of illness and treatment such as physical mutilation, pain, nausea and vomiting. The loss of hair lead to important changes in one's body image, as cancer changes the way a person considers and sees specific parts of the body, as well as the way he or she manages his/her emotional and relational life, also provoking a strong decrease inpersonal autonomy. This is associated with significant psychological and relational consequences including: the manifestation of anxiety and depression, the loss of security, the sense of instability, changes in the body and in the relationships with others, the fear of suffering and death, the change in how one perceives oneself and how one is perceived by others. While cancer impacts on the psychological dimension of the patient, the spiritual and existential dimension are also affected, involving the essence of each of us. The very meaning given to life and existence is influenced by disease (Grassi, 2006).
One of the premises on which psycho-oncology is based is that the psychological distress that a person and his family experience during an oncological illness is not strictly linked to a vulnerability or a psychopathological predisposition of the person himself, but rather to the condition of crisis that the illness brings with it, as a generally unexpected stressful event (Manzo, 2014).
In the field of psycho-oncological research, numerous studies have shown that specific psychic morbidity such as anxiety disorders, depressive disorders, adjustment disorders, and sexuality disorders, together with general emotional suffering, not necessarily framed in psychiatric diagnoses, are very common. Moreover, such suffering has serious and negative consequences on quality of life, compliance, coping styles, and subjective perception of symptoms such as pain, the ability to recover and return to work, as well as survival itself. For this reason, specific psychosocial and psychotherapeutic rehabilitation interventions, adapted to these patients and subjected to experimental verification, are fundamental intervention tools in the different phases of the treatment process (Grassi, 2006).
Psycho-oncology is a discipline that originated within hospital psychology and that has gradually developed over the years into an autonomous discipline with its own specific features. It deals with the “study of the psychosocial variables involved in neoplastic pathologies in a broad sense: from prevention, such as, for example, psychological factors involved in risk behavior, psychological implications of screening programs, to training, that is, training on communication and relations with the patient and family; from research, that is, the psycho[patho]logical consequences of the disease, quality of life, evaluation of psychosocial and psychopharmacological intervention models, to the application in the clinical and care sense of the above areas” (Grassi, 2006).
It is a liason discipline between the oncological area, which focuses exclusively on tumor pathology, and the psychological-psychiatric area, that works on the emotional and management burden that the patient and his/her family are living with the emotional, behavioral, interpersonal, and spiritual dimensions that are affected by the tumor experience and the subsequent treatment pathway.