Coping with Chronic Illness in Childhood and Adolescence

Abstract

Chronic illnesses and medical conditions present millions of children and adolescents with significant stress that is associated with risk for emotional and behavioral problems and interferes with adherence to treatment regimens. We review research on the role of child and adolescent coping with stress as an important feature of the process of adaptation to illness. Recent findings support a control-based model of coping that includes primary control or active coping (efforts to act on the source of stress or one’s emotions), secondary control or accommodative coping (efforts to adapt to the source of stress), and disengagement or passive coping (efforts to avoid or deny the stressor). Evidence suggests the efficacy of secondary control coping in successful adaptation to chronic illness in children and adolescents, disengagement coping is associated with poorer adjustment, and findings for primary control coping are mixed. Avenues for future research are highlighted.

Unmet care needs in people living with advanced cancer: a systematic review

“…If shown to be generalizable/transferrable, interventions for these concerns could be implemented at local levels according to contextual needs. A feature of the most prominent needs is that they are difficult to eliminate or 'problem-solve' and may require more accommodative coping (secondary control versus primary control; e.g., [44]) -in this respect, they resemble prominent needs in chronic illness conditions (consistent with a broader shift in experiences of advanced cancer). There is a need now for interventional studies demonstrating that assessed 'unmet needs' can be addressed: evidence to date for the efficacy of interventions targeting unmet needs is weak [45] and questions remain with respect to whether this reflects limitations of needs assessment tools, broader methodological flaws, ineffectiveness of available interventions, or the inherent difficulty of 'meeting' some expressed needs.…”

Cognitive behavior therapy in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome: The role of illness acceptance and neuroticism

“…Chronic illness, such as CFS, may be considered as a problem that cannot (yet) be cured or solved, and where an accommodative coping strategy and illness acceptance is to be preferred. In line with this view, cross-sectional studies indicate that acceptance plays a role in adjustment to chronic illnesses, amongst which CFS and that acceptance has been found to be associated with a better mental health-related quality of life (MQoL) [17,27,[29][30][31]. Of further interest are the results of Brooks and colleagues, who found that CBT for CFS resulted in an increase of acceptance, and that lack of acceptance was associated with fatigue and physical functioning [15].…”

“…This way of coping with adversity is more and more acknowledged to be related to a good adjustment to chronic illness [17][18][19][20][21][22]. Its function is also well-articulated in self-regulatory models of coping [23][24][25].One example of such a model is the 'Dual-Process Model of Coping of Brandtstädter and colleagues' [26][27], which distinguishes between two complementary coping strategies: accommodative coping and assimilative coping.…”

Self-Compassion, Stress, and Coping in the Context of Chronic Illness

“…Similarly, acceptance, predicts better adjustment in both IBD (Voth & Sirois, 2009) and arthritis (Pinto-Gouveia, Costa, & Marôco, 2013). But, in the context of chronic illness distraction coping is not maladaptive as Allen and Leary (2010) suggest, but adaptive (Compas, Jaser, Dunn, & Rodriguez, 2012). For this reason it was not examined.…”