Counselling

World Health Organization (WHO) projections estimate the incidence of cancer to increase exponentially by the year 2030, with the annual number of new cases rising from 14.1 million in 2012 to 21.6 million in 2030 and deaths due to cancer rising from 8.8 million worldwide in 2015 to more than 12 million in 2030. At the same time, earlier diagnoses and improvement in cancer therapies have also led to an increase in survival that includes more than 300 million cancer survivors around the world. A broad implication of these figures involves the psycho-social impact of the disease, including emotional consequences, supportive care needs, and quality of life of cancer patients and their families. It is a fact that cancer is not only a series of very different diseases needing complex and multidisciplinary treatment but also a very stressful event with significant psychosocial implications related to physical, emotional, spiritual, and interpersonal dimensions. All aspects of life, including the parameters of time (e.g. the past, the present, and the future), space (e.g. one’s own individual space, one’s own home, and one’s own world context), and existence (e.g. confrontation with mortality) are altered by the diagnosis and treatment, recovery and long-survivorship, recurrence, or transition to palliative and end-of-life care. – NCBI ( Source)