IMPRONTE: Breast Cancer Women: Innovative Model for Processing Traumatic Experience

The onset of early breast cancer is a traumatic experience that holds the risk of impairing the quality of life of women even years after the end of treatments. Despite medical advances to reduce the mortality rate, clinical health psychology is still researching for solutions to address the psychological impact caused. Narrative meaning-making processes of the traumatic experience are key elements to promote psychic elaboration and well-being. Narrative Research and PI studies highlight significant markers of the transformative narrative process at the end of treatment. In this case, the narrative is a re-constructive and re-elaborative device for an already passed experience. Nowadays, narrative and diachronic markers of psychic elaboration of the traumatic experience related to the medical treatment do not exist. This project aims to fill this gap. The aim is to overturn, in an innovative way, the view of the literature, studying the narrative as a device to promote a psychic elaboration process in a diachronic way to the illness experience. This agrees with an personalized healthcare. These markers, as functions of connection and narrative transformation, are clues of risk and/or resilience of the psychic elaboration process. These markers allow the construction of a diachronic map of the functioning flow of the traumatic elaboration related to breast cancer (Diachronic flow of Illness Narrative Elaboration Markers - DINEM). DINEM is a precious tool for health operators in order to orient them in supporting the different phases of oncological treatment. The identification of these markers also allows us to build a theoretical model of Narrative Processing of Traumatic Experience (NAPTE) of women with early breast cancer, which is still absent in the literature. This model will be able to positively impact the quality of life of women, hospitals, and health operators.