I’m Coping as Fast as I Can: Psychosocial Adjustment to Cancer and Cancer Treatment

Concerns about understanding and promoting coping with cancer permeate the research and clinical literature in oncology nursing, psychology, social work, medicine, and other healthcare disciplines. This interest in coping also is apparent in the lay literature in first-person accounts of the cancer experience, guidebooks, cancer-specific magazines, and information resources on various types of cancer. Despite extensive interest in understanding coping with illness, clinical application of the results of existing research often is limited by lack of clear implications for practice, questions about assumptions underlying the research and the approach to practice, the diversity and complexity of the conceptual models and theoretical positions used to guide research on coping, and difficulty evaluating the clinical significance of various interventions and approaches to care.