Meeting the Spiritual Care Needs of Emerging Adults with Cancer

Suvi-Maria Saarelainen

doi:10.3390/rel11010016

Abstract

Every year 90,000 young people in Europe and the USA are newly diagnosed with cancer. The majority of earlier studies have taken a quantitative perspective, rarely focusing on the importance of religiosity and spirituality. From these premises, this narrative study explores the spiritual needs of emerging adults with cancer and suggests spiritual care practices that would benefit them in their shift to the remission stage. The data were obtained from the experiences of 16 emerging adults who took part in autobiographical interviews and drew life-tree drawings. Narrative-thematic and visual-narrative methods were used to interpret the data. The results show that spiritual needs manifest in multiple areas: existential questions, value-based searching, and religious seeking. Spiritual care should be targeted to issues such as identity, self-blame, understanding personal values, and relationship with God. Furthermore, family and partners should be supported and dreams of the future after cancer encouraged. The needs for spiritual care are manifold and these needs remain for years after the treatment ends.

Highlights

Cancer is not often considered as affecting young people
Because of the high annual numbers of new diagnoses, it should be understood as a global health issue; every year 70,000 young people in the United States and 20,000 in Europe are diagnosed with cancer. (Vassal et al 2014; Nass et al 2015; Docherty et al 2015) Cure rates are relatively high, with 80 percent of patients being cured (Vassal et al 2014); still, cancer evokes strong psychosocial challenges and longitudinal distress that can follow decades after treatment (Grinyer 2009)
This paper shows that being diagnosed with cancer raises multiple spiritual questions and the

Summary

Introduction

Cancer is not often considered as affecting young people. Yet, because of the high annual numbers of new diagnoses, it should be understood as a global health issue; every year 70,000 young people in the United States and 20,000 in Europe are diagnosed with cancer. (Vassal et al 2014; Nass et al 2015; Docherty et al 2015) Cure rates are relatively high, with 80 percent of patients being cured (Vassal et al 2014); still, cancer evokes strong psychosocial challenges and longitudinal distress that can follow decades after treatment (Grinyer 2009). When running a review of existing research on religious/spiritual coping of young people with cancer, only a handful of studies were found (search in various databases for keywords such as “cancer”, “religious coping”, “meaning”, “meaning-making”, “young adults”, “emerging adults”; see Saarelainen 2016, 2017a). The majority of the studies found were quantitative (as noted by Kent et al 2012) and conducted in the context of the United States. This indicates the pressing need to strengthen European understanding of the role of religious and spiritual aspects in young people’s experience of cancer

Results

Discussion

Conclusion