Psychotherapeutic and psychosocial interventions in cancer

Every cancer patient and also other family members should have the chance to utilize psychosocial support facilities. Nowadays, there are well-defined data for estimating the needs for psychosocial support measures and also empirical evidence demonstrating the effectiveness of the most important psychotherapeutic interventions. However, the implementation of these measures within the healthcare system still has many difficulties. The reasons for this are the complexity and the problems to identify those patients who are in need of psychotherapeutic support. Therefore, there are national and international recommendations to screen every individual cancer patient for psychosocial distress and unmet support needs. The presence of a psychiatric diagnosis is not a sufficient criterion. The most important interventions vary between psychoeducation and supplying information, counseling and psychotherapy. In psychotherapy supportive-expressive as well as cognitive-behavioral interventions have proved their value. Of increasing importance are time-limited (approximately 10 sessions) interventions focusing on specific problems, e.g. fear of disease progression or interventions within palliative care.