Coping with Chronic Illness: Theories, Issues and Lived Experiences

✍ Scribed by Silvia Bonino

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 197
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This valuable book combines psychological theories of health with the lived experience of coping with chronic health conditions, focusing on the "ill person" as an actor of their own development. It draws on perspectives from developmental and health psychology alongside the author’s personal experience of chronic illness.

Bonino considers all aspects of living with illness, from issues that impact on everyday functioning such as pain and fatigue, to the rebuilding of identity through meaningful new goals and effective actions, and the development of therapeutic relationships. Psychological theories are interweaved with descriptions of lived encounters to center the experience of the person living alongside illness and provide insightful points of reference that everyone could try to use when facing the challenges of chronic disease in the course of their daily lives.

Coping with Chronic Illness is important reading for those living with chronic health conditions, as well as for healthcare professionals looking to gain awareness of the psychological issues caused by living with illness. It is also of interest for postgraduate students of health psychology.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of contents
Preface for this edition
Why this book
Part I
Chapter 1 Healthy and ill
Equal and different:
Chapter 2 Beyond the myth of perfect health
Chapter 3 Protagonist of one’s own development
Chapter 4 Protagonist of one’s own development in chronic disease
Part II
Chapter 5 Why me?
Chapter 6 Finding meaning
Chapter 7 Reconstructing identity
Chapter 8 Self-efficacy
The exercise of control:
Chapter 9 Stress
Chapter 10 Coping with stress
Part III
Chapter 11 It is all your fault
Chapter 12 Pain
Chapter 13 Fatigue
Chapter 14 Depression
Chapter 15 Mourning and loss
Chapter 16 Optimism and happiness
Chapter 17 Logical thought and magical thought
Chapter 18 Telling the story of one’s illness
Part IV
Chapter 19 The therapeutic relationship
Chapter 20 Trust
Chapter 21 Empathy
Chapter 22 The patient between statistical logic and clinical logic
Chapter 23 Alternative medicine
Chapter 24 Confidentiality
Part V
Chapter 25 Us and the others
Chapter 26 Between visible and invisible
Chapter 27 Solitude
Chapter 28 Attachments
Chapter 29 Work
Chapter 30 Life and death
Part VI
Chapter 31 Diagnosis: Confronting the truth
Chapter 32 “I want to do it on my own”
Note
Chapter 33 Being ill in the Internet age
Chapter 34 And life goes on
Chapter 35 Parents and children
Bibliography
Part I
On development, adaptation and individual action
On memory and development of higher cognitive functions
On health and disease and on some chronic diseases
On the functioning of mind, emotions, relations between mind and body and between consciousness and unconsciousness
Part II
On identity
On search for meaning
On self-efficacy
On stress, coping, behavioural change, meditation, relaxation, resilience
Part III
On blaming and guilt
On depression, learned helplessness, happiness, optimism
On magic thought
On narrative thought and story telling
Part IV
On empathy
On trust, therapeutic relationship and its different aspects
On different logics, reasoning and decision strategies, heuristics
On communication
Part V
On attachment
On family relations
On solitude
On cooperation and solidarity
On death
Part VI
On communication of diagnosis to children and family life
On the Internet and social media
On the mentioned psychological intervention
Index