| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺北護理健康大學 === 生死與健康心理諮商系 === 104 === Background/Purpose: Meaningless is one of the key factors of demoralization. Making sense of cancer could reduce patients’ demoralization and be positive to suicide prevention. Meaning reconstruction is helpful to patients’ coping with cancer, also increases the posttraumatic growth(PTG) after cancer. The aim of current study is (1) to explore the relationships between demoralization, depression, meaning-making and PTG. (2) to investigate the mechanism of meaning-making and PTG by qualitative and quantitative data.
Methods: Two hundred cancer patients (lung-cancer, lymphoma, or leukemia) at the MacKay Memorial Hospital completed Distress Thermometer (DT), Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9), the Demoralization Scale Mandarin Version (DS-MV), the Posttraumatic Growth Inventory (PTGI), and a self-designed questionnaire for assessing sense-making and benefit finding(Likert scale and written responses to the open-ended questions).
Results: Benefit-finding, one of the meaning-making constructs, is the mediator between demoralization (comparing to depression) and PTG, the impact rate of intermediary almost 54.5%. There are several themes of patients’ sense-making of cancer, including: unhealthy life styles, maladjusted of emotional stress, have to deal with cancer, fatigue of working, etc. Cancer patients’ benefit-finding involve change of healthier lifestyle, broader thinking pattern, better interpersonal relations and stronger personal value/belief, etc. Multiple sense-making and benefit-finding to cancer facilitate patients’ meaning-making constructs.
Conclusion: Cancer patients who got higher sense-making and benefit-finding experienced less demoralization and lower suicide risk factors. In mental care and psychological intervention for cancer patients, one of implications from the results of current study is to increase variability of the themes in patients’ benefit-finding, would lower demoralization and promote PTG after cancer.
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