Abstract

SILVA, Juliana; BRAGA, Rafaela  and  BORGES NETO, Renato. Spirituality and cancer: the construction of patient senses in front of finitude. Psic., Saúde & Doenças [online]. 2022, vol.23, n.3, pp.654-668.  Epub Dec 31, 2022. ISSN 1645-0086.  https://doi.org/10.15309/22psd230306.

For decades, the way in which western society has been dealing with death and dying has been the motivation for several studies, which express that the end of life was not always seen as something necessarily astonishing. In this perspective, palliative care highlights the importance of understanding the multiple dimensions of the subject and includes spirituality as one of the relevant aspects of this context. The search for meaning for suffering and finitude is one of the factors by which we resort to spirituality. Therefore, it was investigated whether and how cancer patients in palliative care resort to spirituality to make sense of the illness based on Viktor Frankl's main theoretical basis. Semi-structured interviews were carried out and the data analyzed using Bardin's Content Analysis. Ten participants made up the sample. It was noticed that the spiritual dimension is incorporated into the patients' life histories, being used as a coping strategy and to discover meaning in the face of the threat of death.

Keywords : Neoplasms; Spirituality; Palliative care; Death.

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