Coping with Cancer: What Illness Perceptions Do?

Cancer has all the potentials to affect nearly each aspect of a person’s life. In fact, the complex treatment procedures of the diagnosed individual itself can create distress which can have a long term damaging impact on patients’ mental health and healing progress in itself. Hence, an understanding of cancer patients’ current experiences and the way they perceive their condition could be very helpful for both patients and health professionals. In that way, the present piece of work attempt to explore the varied illness perceptions of cancer patients to know whether it explain changes in the application of different coping strategies. Self-reported illness perception and coping strategies were investigated using revised illness perception questionnaire and Coping Operation Preference Enquiry (COPE-28). The sample comprised of 80 cancer patients (40 male, 40 female). The results of multiple stepwise regression analysis demonstrated that illness perception dimensions accounted a greater percentage of the variance in the coping strategies used by the participants to manage their illness. Cure/control perception over illness, attributing internal factors to illness causation and having better understanding about the illness encourages adaptive coping strategy which might be important in improving psychological and physical health too. The potential role of varied illness perceptions in the management of cancer is discussed in the light of Leventhal’s self-regulation model (1984).