ABSTRACT
Research in relation to Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) has provided an important new framework for understanding stress and the experience of cancer. The body of work on PTSD provides significant insights into the experiences of many patients undergoing cancer treatments, as well as those of the care-givers and families who nurture them. This work indicates that there is an urgent need for intervention strategies which identify vulnerable individuals and provide them with appropriate counselling and support. Because this work is very new, there is, to date, few studies completed on haematological malignancies, and so this over-view will have to be set in the wider context of the work completed on cancer in general. In the section on original research, however, only studies specific to haematological malignancies will be included. A full overview of the research in relation to cancer from which much of the material for the present discussion is drawn has been published elsewhere (McGrath, 1999).
