Counseling Individuals with Life Threatening Illness

A guide for counselors, social workers, and health care professionals as they assist clients experiencing a serious illness. It builds on a model developed by the author and based upon earlier work by Avery Weisman and E M Patterson.

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This useful book is a comprehensive and holistic guide for counselors, social workers, and health care professionals as they assist clients experiencing a serious illness. The book builds on a model developed by the author and based upon earlier work by Avery Weisman and E. M. Patterson.The model views illness as a series of phases - a prediagnostic phase where individuals may decide how to handle troubling symptoms or to take certain diagnostic tests; a diagnostic phase centered on the existential crises posed by the diagnosis; a chronic phase where individuals must cope with the disease and treatment; a recovery phase that acknowledges that even when individuals survive an encounter with life-threatening illness, there are still considerable issues that must be resolved; and a terminal phase where individuals deal with the inevitability of death. In his discussion of each phase, the author delineates specific tasks or issues that individuals must adapt to and strategies for counselors and health care professionals to counsel individuals with life-threatening illness.