1st Edition
Coping with Chronic Illness Theories, Issues and Lived Experiences
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
Preface for this edition
Why this book
Part I
1. Healthy and ill: equal and different 2. Beyond the myth of perfect health
3. Protagonist of one’s own development
4. Protagonist of one’s own development in chronic disease
Part II
5. Why me?
6. Finding meaning
7. Reconstructing identity
8. Self-efficacy: the exercise of control
9. Stress
10. Coping with stress
Part III
11. It is all your fault
12. Pain
13. Fatigue
14. Depression
15. Mourning and loss
16. Optimism and happiness
17. Logical thought magical thought
18. Telling the story of one’s illness
Part IV
19. The therapeutic relationship
20. Trust
21. Empathy
22. The patient between statistical logic and clinical logic
23. Alternative medicine
24. Confidentiality
Part V
25. Us and the others
26. Between visible and invisible
27. Solitude
28. Attachments
29. Work
30. Life and death
Part VI
31. Diagnosis: confronting the truth
32. "I want to do it on my own"
33. Being ill in the Internet age
34. And life goes on
35. Parents and children
Bibliography
Biography
Silvia Bonino is Professor Emeritus of Developmental Psychology in the Department of Psychology of the University of Turin (Italy), where she founded the Laboratory of Developmental Psychology. She is the author of Nature and Culture in Intimate Partner Violence: Sex, Love and Equality, (Routledge, 2018).
This book brings a new vision into the experience of living with chronic disease. Silvia Bonino had the courage and intelligence to put her knowledge as professor of developmental psychology in dialogue with her personal experience to produce a very fine and sensitive description of the processes, emotions, states of mind, strategies and mechanisms of defence of the chronic patient. It offers both a critical and constructive look at the intervention of different health personnel, highlighting the need for better communication between professionals and patients. An indispensable book for both caregivers and chronically ill!
Michel Born, Professor, University of Liège, Belgium
