Cancer Prevention Sense Making and Metaphors in Young Women’s Invented Stories

Abstract

Despite the proven effectiveness of cancer prevention, the literature highlights numerous obstacles to the adoption of screening, even at a young age. In cancer discourse, the metaphor of war is omnipresent and reflects an imperative demand to win the war against disease. From the psychodynamic perspective, the risk of cancer forecasts an emotionally critical experience for which it is important to study mental representations concerning illness and health care. Through the creation of an invented story that offers a framework for imagination, our aim is to understand what the relationship with preventive practices in oncology means for young women and how this relationship is revealed by their metaphors. A total of 58 young women voluntarily participated in the present research, answering a narrative prompt. The stories written by the participants were analyzed using qualitative methodology to identify construct, themes and metaphors. Our findings identify four constructs: the construction of a defense: youth as protection; the attribution of blame about cancer risk; learning from experience as a prevention activator; and from inaccessibility to access to preventive practices: the creation of engagement. The construction of an invented story allows us to promote a process of prefiguration on the bodily, affective and thought planes invested in preventive practice and brings out the use of metaphors to represent cancer risk and self-care. The results allow us to think about the construction of interventions to promote engagement processes in prevention from an early age.

Cancer experience in metaphors: patients, carers, professionals, students – a scoping review

“…If the authors do not provide quotations from the data to support their classification of the metaphors elicited from the participants in their studies, we will exclude them from the results section, such as the studies by Lemmo et al, 25 Fergus et al 26 and Kırca and Kaş. 27 All these methodological considerations result from an observation that the selected papers are multidisciplinary in nature, and therefore, the ways they define and label metaphors are different.…”

“No man is an island”: How Chinese netizens use deliberate metaphors to provide “depression sufferers” with social support

“…As pervasive phenomena in our everyday life, 8 metaphors have widely been used to explore complicated, emotionally laden, and culture-related health communication. 10 , 29 – 31 This is due to their ability to aid individuals in articulating complex and emotional concepts in the target domains through simpler or more familiar phenomena in the source domains. 8 Additionally, as a means of expressing specific thinking patterns, metaphors contribute to reflecting cultural beliefs embedded in language.…”

Emotions and Narrative Reappraisal Strategies of Users of Breast Cancer Screening: Reconstructing the Past, Passing Through the Present, and Predicting Emotions

“…We believe that the AFT could be observed in the epistemological framework of narrative meaning-making (Freda & Martino, 2015; Freda et al, 2023; Lemmo, Martino, & Freda, 2022; Lemmo, Martino, and Freda, 2022; Martino et al, 2023) of a number of specific contributions that intend to promote the understanding of the emotional processes involved in the construction of preventive and/or health behaviors (Table 1).…”