Background: Cancer has an enormous impact on the patient, triggering fears of suffering, disability and death. Still, little research has been published which investigates the coping strategies adopted by cancer patients, when attempting to deal with their serious health threat. Moreover, it is often not clarified whether the selected coping strategies are used exclusively by cancer patients, or whether other groups of women facing benign breast diseases or having health worries regarding their breasts share similar coping strategies. This study attempts to identify those coping strategies that distinguish breast cancer patients from non-malignant controls. Methods: A sample of 180 breast cancer patients was assessed on how it coped with health threats. The control group was composed of 268 women who were diagnosed as having either a benign disease or were disease free. The Ways of Coping Questionnaire was administered in order to record the frequency of the coping strategies used under the health conditions. Univariate analyses were conducted to compare mean scores in coping strategies among the diagnostic groups. Multivariate analyses were performed to identify those variables that distinguish one group from the other. Results: Compared with women with benign breast disease and those who were disease free, breast cancer patients significantly infrequently exhibited attributions of blame to self, whereas they did not differ from controls in other ways of coping such as self-isolation, passive acceptance, seeking social support, problem-focused coping, positive reappraisal, distancing, and wishful thinking. Conclusion: Our results may suggest that under the conditions of a cancer diagnosis, patients do not tend to assign responsibility on themselves and their character, since they possibly need to avoid guilt, low self-esteem, and social distance, and to maintain a potential to invest in the adjustment process.

A group of 46 persons who had attempted suicide by jumping was compared on clinical and social-demographic parameters with another group of 214 persons who had attempted suicide by drug overdose. The differential characteristics of persons attempting suicide by jumping are the following: more often men, of a more advanced age, married or widowed, more often suffering from major psychopathology (that is affective psychosis-depressive type or schizophrenia), and quite frequently having a serious somatic illness.

A mild form of neuroleptic malignant syndrome (NMS) in a schizophrenic patient who was receiving a depot neuroleptic is described and beneficial response to oral diazepam 50 mg daily is reported.

Two measures of personality characteristics, the Personality Deviance Scale and the Toronto Alexithymia Scale, were administered to a total sample of 448 women and a subsample of 100 women, respectively, attending two breast-screening centers in Athens. The relative risk of breast cancer between women with low denigratory attitudes towards others and women with high scores in this scale was 2.31. Statistically significant relations were not noted between the mean scores of alexithymia factors and breast cancer diagnosis. Our findings point to the conclusion that breast cancer patients can be distinguished from healthy women on the basis of their cognitive activity, characterized by rare denigratory thoughts.

Male patients suffering from borderline personality disorder (n = 13), major depression (n = 13) or schizophrenia (n = 13) were investigated on several psychopathological (HDRS, BPRS) and neuroendocrinological (DST and TSH, PRL, GH responses to TRH) parameters. Comparisons were made between the borderline group and the other groups of patients. Borderline patients differed from schizophrenics psychopathologically (BPRS) and neuroendocrinologically (DST). Also, borderline patients differed from major depressives in the HDRS, but behaved like them concerning DST. Our findings support the hypothesis that there are neuroendocrinological similarities between borderline personality disorder and major depressive patients, especially on the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal axis.