Episode 036: How To Be More Resilient During Cancer
Sep 21, 2018•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Episode description
Having cancer blow up in your face is never easy, but it’s especially tough when you are only just beginning to make your way through life as a teenager or a young adult. Michael has been through cancer himself and he and went on to become a psychologist helping thousands of young people to deal with cancer. He’s also built this incredible support system through CanTeen, an organisation that helps so many young people to deal with caner emotionally and socially. Michael is simply an amazing person and a brilliant mind! Here are some things we cover today:
4 key developmental tasks teenagers struggle with the most during cancer
Why peer support group is crucial during cancer
3 key factors that enable us to deal better with cancer
Key approach to build resilience for young adults
How to deal with uncertainty
and much, much more!
Links
CanTeen
Dr Michael Carr-Gregg
The Grief Book
Good Thinking: A Teenager's Guide to Managing Stress and Emotion Using CBT
Change your Thinking by Sarah Edelman
moodgym - Online self-help for depression and anxiety
This Way Up
MindSpot
Episode 026: Stand Up For Your Rights
Episode 033: Your Sexuality and Intimacy Through Cancer
Full Transcript
Joe: Michael, so how did you first come across cancer?
Michael: I was diagnosed with a garrotted tumour in my neck when I was 18 years of age. I was basically told that once the diagnosis had been made that there was very little hope, that I had about three months to live.
Joe: Wow.
Michael: That’s how I came across cancer.
Joe: That’s shocking. What happened next?
Michael: I was given a choice of having palliative care or I could have lots of head and neck radiotherapy, but it was explained to me because this was the mid-70s, that the amount of radiotherapy that they would have to use to kill the tumour would kill a lot of the tissue around it. There was no guarantee that I would survive the treatment, but I elected to have the treatment. It was pretty horrible, I didn’t enjoy it very much, but I’m here, so it was a good decision.
Joe: That changed the course of your life?
Michael: It certainly did, certainly did. When I was in hospital, I read a book which changed my life. It was a book called: The Private Worlds of Dying Children. It was a book by a medical anthropologist called Myra Bluebond-Langer. Very strange name. What she’d done is, in the 70s, she’d gone into a children’s leukaemia ward and she just stayed there for a year talking to the children, just playing with them.
She discovered so much interesting stuff. The thing that really struck me is that even the policy on this children’s leukaemia ward was not to tell them that they were dying, they all knew anyway, but they also knew that they had to keep that knowledge from their mothers and fathers. Myra called this the mutual pre-tense syndrome. I just became fascinated by the whole area of psychology, cancer, and what later became as psychosocial oncology.
Joe: Yes, that’s really amazing, Michael, and you started CanTeen, which was the first support group for teenagers and children around cancer, which is absolutely amazing. How did that come about?
Michael: I wrote my PhD at the University of New South Wales on adolescents with cancer. I didn’t stay for one year, I stayed for four years on the ward, just talking to the kids as they lived and died. I discovered that the doctors back then assumed that if they made the young people’s bodies resilient to the disease that their minds would follow. In fact, it didn’t work that way at all. Many of the kids had significant psychological problems in addition to battling cancer.
It struck me, and this is what my PhD said, that we need to look after their minds, as well. This was, I think I finished in 84’,
