Abstract

ENRIQUEZ VILLOTA, María Fernanda. STRATEGIES OF PSYCHOLOGICAL COPING IN BREAST CANCER. Univ. Salud [online]. 2010, vol.12, n.1, pp.7-19. ISSN 0124-7107.

When people speak about psychological confrontation they refer to the way humans respond to external or internal circumstances. Depending on how they are evaluated by themselves, it can be said that when a person is facing a surplus situation scope, in this case chronic illness, all the skills and abilities of the individual are highlighted to cope. The adaptation to this new condition of life for both patients and their families involves a psychological effort to accept the diagnosis, the procedures for clinical care, being subjected to tests or medical examinations, specialist consultations and treatment with all the side effects which are almost always unwanted. It is during this process when patients evidence their psychological confrontation strategies that each one of the uses to deal with the disease in order to achieve balance or to reduce the anxiety caused by the stressful event. In order to understand this process more deeply, a mixed research was undertaken to characterize the facing strategies most used by a group of women in the region, and from the findings it was possible to construct a psychological intervention proposal aimed at strengthening these strategies that favor the recovery process of patients.

Keywords : Psychological confrontation strategies; breast cancer.

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