Exploration of emotional journey navigation with coping approaches for breast cancer patients
Abstract
Breast cancer survivors face significant obstacles even after receiving effective treatment, including problems with body image, anxiety and despair, stress from lifestyle changes, and ongoing difficulties managing their health. Among female-specific illnesses, breast cancer ranks high. Although mortality rates have decreased due to therapies and prevention efforts, patients’ physical, emotional, cognitive, social, and spiritual lives are still profoundly affected by their diagnosis and subsequent treatment. It is conceivable that targeted psychosocial therapies to improve the health and well-being of women living with breast cancer may be better designed if there is a better understanding of how these people, both mentally and emotionally, reflect their disease and coping mechanisms. This study explored the illness perceptions and coping strategies among women receiving care for breast cancer. This study seeks to explore the experiences of the different stages women with breast cancer go through employing a patient journey. In this research, 15 adults who had breast cancer surgery were interviewed individually using a web-based survey (WBS) within three months after the procedure. Foundational data (such as sociodemographics) was derived via quantitative surveys. This study used thematic analysis to examine each interview separately. Suicide ideation and mental health concept validation was the goal of the quantitative data analysis that made use of confirmatory factor analysis. Afterwards, this study isolated and scaled the significant relationships between mental health and suicidal thoughts for additional bivariate analysis. Interview transcripts and survey replies were subjected to a qualitative inductive theme analysis. Patient journey and patient diagnosis and continuing during therapy, sentiment analysis was used to enhance the thematic results.
Copyright (c) 2025 Chengzhe Guo, Shibing Zhou, Shanshan Yuan

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
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