Self - Help Organization Of Cancer Patients And The Use Of Social Support

Nobody could survive or live without social support. Cancer patients need more social support than ordinary people. However, clinical research data shows that cancer patients own more actual social support than healthy people, but the level of social support utilization is often lower than that of healthy people. And a large number of previous studies have indicated that cancer patients participate in self-help organizations contributing to improve their level of social support utilization. Then, why do cancer patients participate in self-help activities that contribute to improving their levels of social support utilization? This is the core issue to be discussed in this paper.Based on the review and the investigation of the Shanghai Cancer Rehabilitation Club as the object, this paper analyzes and demonstrates the above problems. 200 members of the Shanghai Cancer Rehabilitation Club and 200 cancer patients who did not participate in any cancer patients self-help organization were selected as control group, then 173 and 165 questionnaires were recovered separately.According to the advanced study, social support can be divided into “actual social support” and “perceived social support”, this paper proposes that there are two ways in improving the social support level: one is to improve the level of perception of the actual social support; the second is to add and expand the resources of actual social support. Based on the first-hand information obtained from the survey of the Shanghai Cancer Rehabilitation Club, this paper analyzes the mechanism of cancer patients self-help organization from the above two aspects.The main conclusions of this paper can be summarized as follows:First of all, members of the cancer patients self-help organizations participated in various activities, which help them to maximize the utilization of the actual social support. This is because: first, members of the cancer patients self-help organizations more actively participated in various activities, more incline to adopt positive coping style; second, the coping styles of these patients with cancer tend to actively, which is helpful to improve the cognition and evaluation to social support; third, the level of perceived social support is higher, the easier it will be to improve the level of actual social support utilization.Secondly, cancer patients participate in cancer patients self-help organizations, which increase the availability of social support resources, thereby expanding the original actual social support, improve social support utilization level. These new available social support resources mainly come from three aspects: first, in the interior of the cancer patients self-help organization, members offer mutual support and share resource to each other; second, cancer patients self-help organizations, with the power of the organization, integrate all kinds of outside social support resources; third, after participating in self-help organizations, members’ coping styles tend to be positively, so as to take a more active way to strive for social support resources.In addition, the conclusions of this study can be extended to other patients and their family members or parents at least in theory. And participating in the self-help organizations/groups contribute to improving their levels of social support utilization.