How to address mental or emotional suffering in patients and help guide them toward reconciliation.

This study addresses the patient's inner experience of illness, analyzing an aspect too often overlooked or outright denied in healthcare protocols: something we have dubbed an "injury to identity." For illness often leads to a process of intimate self-devaluation in the patient, feelings of failure that can have a profound impact on self-esteem. Effects from the physical changes that illness imposes can extend far beneath the surface, causing deep-seated turmoil and distress, sometimes even verging on self-hatred.