Intervención en crisis ante el diagnóstico de cáncer de mama

Abstract

Being diagnosed with a serious illness like cancer involves a catastrophic surprise because expectations of future collapse, projects become meaningless in the light of knowledge of diagnosis (Gomez, 2006), and a crisis is caused. Therefore, crisis intervention is one of the most frequently used procedures at this stage of illness progression, when patients have just been told about their diagnosis. Feelings at this moment have to be changed, thus as the anxiety reaction. Crisis intervention scheme in the case of M, women of 42 years old, married, after the communication of breast cancer diagnosis and the pertinence of mastectomy is presented in this paper. After of crisis intervention, behavioral changes were observed in three levels of response, nevertheless, incorporation of M to a conventional psychotherapy program was considered appropriate because she had risk factors that could foster a new crisis. In conclusion, although the intervention met the stated objectives is important to incorporate people with newly diagnosed chronic illness such as cancer to group programs or individual counseling, in order to acquire and use coping strategies that allow their adaptation to illness and the treatments proposed.