Coping with Physical Illness: 2: New Perspectives

This book provides new ideas about how patients and their fami- lies cope with serious health crises. Biomedical knowledge has expanded abruptly in the past decade during which time diag- nostic and treatment procedures have become unusually specific and effective. Similarly, important advances have taken place in our understanding of the central role of psychosocial factors in health and illness. Recent trends have sparked the formulation of useful concepts of coping skills and social resources and have empha- sized the value of an active assertive role for patients in the pro- cess of obtaining health care. The emergence of subspecialties such as behavioral medicine and health psychology has stimulated renewed interest in these areas. Moreover, the growth of holistic medicine and a biopsychosocial orientation highlights the contri- bution of a psychosocial perspective in an integrated framework for providing health care. To cover these diverse trends, I offer a unified conceptual approach for understanding the process of coping with the crisis of physical illness and identifying the underlying adaptive tasks and domains of coping skills involved in this process. The first half of the book covers coping with selected health crises, such as birth defects and perinatal death, childhood and adult cancer, and chronic physical disabilities.

Table of Contents:
I. Overview.- 1. The Crisis of Physical Illness: An Overview and Conceptual Approach.- II. The Crisis of Illness: Birth Defects and Perinatal Death.- 2. Parents’ Reactions to the Birth of a Sick Infant.- 3. Mourning by the Family after a Stillbirth or Neonatal Death.- 4. Observations of Paternal Response to Sudden Unanticipated Infant Death.- III. The Crisis of Illness: Childhood Cancer.- 5. Psychological Stages in Childhood Cancer.- 6. Coping by Children Undergoing Limb Amputation.- 7. How Adolescents Live with Leukemia.- IV. The Crisis of Illness: Cancer among Adults.- 8. A Model for Psychosocial Phasing in Cancer.- 9. Adaptive Coping Mechanisms in Adult Acute Leukemia Patients in Remission.- 10. Of Dragons and Garden Peas: A Cancer Patient Talks to Doctors.- V. The Crisis of Illness: Chronic Conditions.- 11. Reactions of Families to Children with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy.- 12. Family Adaptation to Traumatic Spinal Cord Injury: Response to Crisis.- 13. Coping with Quadriplegia.- VI. The Crisis of Treatment: Hospital Environments.- 14. Issues in the Psychological Care of Pediatric Oncology Patients.- 15. Psychological Stress in Families of Children in a Pediatric Intensive Care Unit.- 16. Coping with Poor Prognosis in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit: The Cassandra Prophecy.- VII. The Crisis of Treatment: Bone Marrow Transplantation.- 17. Stages of Bone Marrow Transplantation: A Psychiatric Perspective.- 18. Factors Affecting Coping of Adolescents and Infants on a Reverse Isolation Unit.- VIII. The Crisis of Treatment: Kidney Dialysis and Transplantation.- 19. Psychological Adaptation to Hemodialysis.- 20. Helping Families Respond Effectively to Chronic Illness: Home Dialysis as a Case Example.- 21. An Unsung Hero: The Living Related Kidney Donor.- IX. The Crisisof Treatment: Total Parenteral Nutrition.- 22. Permanent Total Parenteral Nutrition: Psychological and Social Responses of the Early Stages.- 23. Psychological Aspects of Long-Term Home Hyperalimentation.- X. The Crisis of Treatment: Stresses on Staff.- 24. Understanding the Cancer Patient: The Syndrome of Caregiver’s Plight.- 25. Staff Groups in a Pediatric Hospital: Content and Coping.- 26. Changing Hospital Work Environments: An Example of a Burn Unit.- XI. The Final Crisis: Death and the Fear of Dying.- 27. How the Terminal Patient Accepts Dying.- 28. A Support Group for Dying Patients.- 29. A Special Christmas: An Account of the Last Christmas of Barbara Mackenzie Rogers Hepner.- Author Index.