DENIAL, AS A NEW FORM OF SUICIDE FOR THE TERMINALLY ILL

This weekend I went to yet another funeral for a brilliant young mind killed by HIV/AIDS. No point of correction, he died because of his refusal to accept and manage his terminal illness. He committed suicide by locking himself in denial regarding his illness.

Currently the management and treatment of HIV/AIDS is readily available and accessible to all South Africans. The life expectancy figures for people living with HIV have double since 1999 as per the World Health Organisation. People living with HIV/AIDS are able to lead full and productive lives, so why is it that so many still struggle with coming to terms with their positive diagnosis?

Dr Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, a pioneer and expert in the field of coping with death and dying suggests that individuals diagnosed with a terminal illness go through five stages when dealing with their diagnoses, namely denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Some of these patients can get locked in the denial stage when trying to deal with the traumatic change that their illness might require.

Denial is a natural defence mechanism that gives us time to deal with our grief at our own pace and is an important step towards acceptance.

The conundrum then lies in the fact that time is a commodity that the terminally ill can ill afford to waste. In most cases diagnoses occurs at a stage where immediate decisions need to be made regarding the treatment and management of the condition. This then limits the time that the patient can spend in the denial stage without dire consequences. Any lack of immediate medical intervention and care could subsequently lead to the reduction of the individual’s life expectancy and the acceleration of mortality.

Stigma, shame and or disgrace, whichever way you like to put it, is a particularly anxiety provoking condition that sometimes perpetually locks the terminally ill individual in the denial stage. It has a profound impact on their ability to either regain or maintain their functional capacity and accept their illness. In an effort to avoid being stigmatised, individuals have denied, minimized and ignored their condition and treatment as was the case in this instance. Stigma can elicits ostrich like behaviour in the terminally ill that can lead them to an early grave.

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, stigma is an individual’s struggle. For it is not in the attainment of societal acceptance that we are freed from its clutches, but in the realization of our own sense of self-worth and value. It is an intrinsic struggle rather than an external one that each and every one of us deals with whether suffering from a terminal illness or not. 

Comments

Anonymous said…
excellent article, wish more people could read it and realise that a positive diagnosis is not the end of the world
August 6, 2011 at 10:38 PM
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