Chronic Illness, Psychosocial Coping with

Improvements in health care technologies and treatments have resulted in increased life expectancies and improved disease management potential for individuals with chronic illnesses. To a great degree, quality of life may be determined by the ways they deal with the illness. Thus, identifying effective ways of coping with these diseases may lead to the development of efficacious interventions. Since 1980 there has been a substantial amount of research devoted to understanding the relation between coping with chronic illnesses and psychological adaptation. The majority of this research has used Lazarus and Folkman's Stress and Coping paradigm. Although there have been some consistent findings regarding general types of coping and their impact on psychological outcomes, particularly in the area of coping with pain, the enthusiasm for the empirical study of coping in general has dampened significantly over the course of the past several years. However, more recent studies have used idiographic and nomothetic designs that can more clearly elucidate the dynamic associations between stress, coping, and psychological adaptation to chronic illness. These advanceshold a great deal of promise for the field of coping with chronic illness.