The Role of Emotions in Palliative Care.
Emotions are inherent to human condition and color all the activities we do every single day. They are the most important engine in our lives and facilitate the adaptation to environmental demands: they influence the cognitive superior processes, for example, perception, thinking, decision-making, language, beliefs, motivation, learning, memory and our behavior and intentions.
People coping with advanced illness or life-threatening diseases, such as cancer, experience many symptoms, emotions, and feelings during their illness trajectory that can contribute to their suffering.
These emotions may result from a variety of different factors and the intensity usually varies considerably from day-to-day, hour to hour and patient to patient.
Using a metaphor to illustrate this point, the patient may experience a kind of emotional salad, where different emotions
appear as different types of lettuce leaf with different degree of intensity as a result of the coping process and the proximity of impending death.
The most common negative emotions are loneliness, anxiety, anger, fear, guilt, hopelessness, sadness, but the patient can also experience positive emotions.
These emotions are experienced by the patient but also by the different members of their family, especially by the caregiver; they are dynamic and contribute to the well-being or emotional distress of the patient/caregiver.
Many of these emotional reactions of the patient/caregiver during the illness trajectory are “normal” and are related to the adaptation process and with the significance of the impending loss.
Palliat Med Hosp Care Open J. 2018; 4(1): 7-9. doi: 10.17140/PMHCOJ-4-127