Psychosocial Interventions 101: How These Programs Can Support You
I’m super excited to write about this topic (even if no one reads it) because I think it’s really important. I’ve worked as an interventionist at a cancer center for about 4 years. Basically, what I do is meet with people to guide them through the intervention, which is a sort of program created to help anyone dealing with – in this case - cancer or its impact. The kind of interventions I’m talking about are not anything that tests medication and how it works or the side effects. I’m referring to psychosocial interventions, which are created to do things like:
Educate people about what to expect emotionally and practically as they go through the cancer experience, from diagnosis all the way through to survivorship
How to communicate about cancer with family, friends, coworkers or even people you’re not close to
Teach people skills like problem-solving or reframing how you might feel about physical changes
How to figure out what life can look like once treatment ends
Help researchers find out what kind of support is most helpful for patients, survivors, and caregivers
There are tons of interventions out there, so this is just a small list of what they might cover. Sometimes interventions will also confirm what you’ve heard from the medical team. So for example, if there’s an intervention for the physical changes a breast cancer patient might go through and how to cope with them, you may start off learning a little about the common treatments this group may have. This can be helpful for a lot of people. It can be overwhelming to hear about a cancer diagnosis and everything that goes along with it (including all of the information that’s thrown at you), and sometimes having things repeated by different people can help it sink in.
When you enroll in an intervention, you might meet with someone who has some kind of counseling background, whether that’s an actual therapist, social worker, or a student being supervised by one of those people (or a researcher psychologist). But there’s also a push to have other people who don’t have that background trained too, since it could be really helpful if more people are around to meet with you.
Why You Might Consider Enrolling in One:
There’s a few reasons enrolling in an intervention could be helpful for you.
1. You get a space to talk about what’s been happening.
Interventions are not therapy but you do get the chance to sit with someone - outside of your family and friends - with knowledge about what you might be dealing with. That can be huge for a lot of people; I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve had people tell me that they just couldn’t find someone who gets it, whether it was a therapist outside of a cancer center or someone they knew. But this changes that.
And I have to say that many of the people I’ve met with have been surprised at the emotions that come out once they start talking. Since life keeps going after a cancer diagnosis, there may not have been many opportunities for you to actually admit or confront what you’re feeling.
And speaking of trying to make it through – one reason people give for not enrolling is that they just have too much on their plate. This is totally understandable and real. But it can also be true that having this space and the chance to learn the skills taught in an intervention can help you better recognize when you’re getting close to that breaking point and how to deal with it.
2. You get to give back.
The second reason for enrolling in an intervention is probably the most common one I hear. People want to do their part in making sure others have a different experience than they did. And there’s so many ways to do this because the development of an intervention has a bunch of different phases. So you might be the person who gets interviewed so researchers can find out what kind of support people even need. And then they’ll need people to test out the intervention with. This is typically done in something called a pilot study and it tells researchers what people think about their intervention, if it was helpful, what should be changed, and if what they’re asking people to do (whether that’s coming for a certain number of sessions or doing practice exercises in between) is even doable in real life. That’s also why it’s really helpful to have as many kinds of people enroll as possible, so they can get an idea of who the intervention works for. What works for the single father going through colorectal cancer treatment might not work for the 18-year-old diagnosed in their 1st semester of college or the LGBT couple in their 30s.
How Interventions Are Made to Work for You
Interventions need to be respectful of what’s going on in your world, so they’re very flexible in a lot of ways, like:
Time built in for you to reschedule. I pretty much expect that this will happen with almost everyone, especially if they’re undergoing treatment and don’t know how they (or the person they’re caring for) will feel from day to day.
Phone vs. in person vs. virtual. A lot of us got used to doing things virtually during the pandemic and that included researchers. And, as I mentioned before, it’s super important that interventions actually be something that people can and want to do. So some interventions have multiple options for meeting that people can take advantage of depending on how they feel that week, what’s going on in their life, or even whether they prefer in-person or virtual sessions.
The last thing to know is that treatment will never be stopped if you decide to leave the study. You should be told this upfront and you can leave for any reason and at any point. You may be asked if you’re willing to stay on to do some surveys because that still gives the group some data that they can use. But again, that’s totally up to you. Any time you give us is helpful.
If you’re interested in research and how a group of AYA patients helped researchers with specific examples, check out the results section of this paper (Note: this article includes patients with advanced or metastatic cancer. There are brief references to death). It wasn’t done in the US but it’s a great example of the kind of impact you can have. And feel free to comment below on any interventions you’ve been a part of!
References:
Burgers, V. W. G., Dickhout, A., Harthoorn, N. C. G. L., Frissen, S. A. M. M., Noordhoek, M. J., Franssen, S. A., Reuvers, M. J. P., van der Graaf, W. T. A., & Husson, O. (2023). Involving adolescents and young adults (AYA) with an uncertain or poor cancer prognosis as research partners. Acta oncologica (Stockholm, Sweden), 62(8), 961–968. https://doi.org/10.1080/0284186X.2023.2238554
Cancer Council NSW (No Date). Withdrawing from a study. https://www.cancercouncil.com.au/cancer-information/cancer-treatment/clinical-trials/joining-a-study/withdrawing/
Murnaghan, S., Scruton, S., & Urquhart, R. (2024). Psychosocial interventions that target adult cancer survivors' reintegration into daily life after active cancer treatment: a scoping review. JBI evidence synthesis, 22(4), 607–656. https://doi.org/10.11124/JBIES-23-00044
Zhang, Y., Flannery, M., Zhang, Z., Underhill-Blazey, M., Bobry, M., Leblanc, N., Rodriguez, D., & Zhang, C. (2024). Digital Health Psychosocial Intervention in Adult Patients With Cancer and Their Families: Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. JMIR cancer, 10, e46116.https://doi.org/10.2196/46116