World Cancer Day | How psycho-oncology is changing cancer care by making room for the mind

On World Cancer Day, a cancer survivor examines how treating the mind alongside the tumour is finally becoming a critical pillar of oncology in India

Every family today knows someone with cancer. It is no longer a disease that happens to an ageing parent or relative — there’s no distant morbid otherness.

In early 2018, after my treatment for Stage 3 ovarian cancer, I was told that I had reached the triumphant stage called NED (No Evidence of Disease). It was a rare, positivity-fuel day. The baldpate, oppressed bone marrow, and thousands of niggling pains in my body be damned, I thought; the stakes were high, I wanted to live, and I ought to try everything.

The cancer experience is singularly brutal and isolating. Our fundamental building blocks, the body’s cells, go rogue, and addressing all parts of my being made profound sense, including my mental and emotional health. Unlike now, psycho-oncology was not a formal part of oncology departments at all hospitals in 2018. So, I decided to call Vijay Bhat.

Bhat, co-author of My Cancer Is Me: The Journey From Illness To Wholeness (2013), is founder of the organisation Cancer Awakens in Mumbai. Colon cancer in his early 50s brought the former CEO of ad agency Ogilvy & Mather back to India. Now, he is a cancer survivor of 25 years — a “cancer thriver” in wellness-oncology speak.

Registering for the NGO’s mental-emotional support programme was a turning point. The “new normal” was tougher than I had imagined. Part of what Cancer Awakens sherpa, and now my friend and a mentor, Anamika Chakravarty did with me was psycho-oncology. She addressed my emotional and mental stressors, identified in various aspects of my life through an elaborate set of questionnaires, over 23 sessions. I found direction to seek tailor-made solutions from experts. (Bhat himself had combined various models of western mental health solutions as well as ancient healing methods, which he had rigorously researched and experimented with.) Self-awareness acquired new meaning after this slow, empowering experience. I embraced therapy not just as a cancer survivor, but for all my existential coils.

Now, nine years later, ahead of World Cancer Day on February 4, an ad selling a psycho-oncology certification course just popped up on my mobile phone.