by Moe PrinceIn “Holistic Humor: Coping with Breast Cancer” Kathryn Bouskill discusses how humor is used within breast cancer survivor support groups as a method of coping. She does a great job of addressing how this tactic is used socially, cognitively, linguistically, and neurologically. This was done through an ethnographic study of a support center located next to the public hospital where many of the survivors were treated. This included semi-structured interviews and participant observation. The support center studied held both planned and unplanned group sessions where often times the group of women who participated would be laughing and cracking jokes about their situations for the entirety of the meeting. Since this was done in an urban area, she also was able to collect testimonies from women of different races, ages, backgrounds, and socioeconomic statuses. Though they were all different, humor helped them band together in the face of an extremely stressful situation.
Though breast cancer is an extremely well broadcasted disease today, it used to be highly stigmatized. Through the work of political, feminist, and corporate groups awareness skyrocketed and has given many women more control over their treatment and provided them with large amounts of public support. Though this push has taken away most of the shame associated with a breast cancer diagnosis, it hasn’t done much with providing a way for survivors to cope or give them an outlet to openly discuss the difficulties they face. Support centers have been instrumental in giving just that. Bouskill used the term ”cancer world” to describe the new experience of being diagnosed with breast cancer. When someone is knew to “cancer world”, other survivors are instrumental in helping them understand these new transitions and how to deal with the stress. That’s where humor comes in. These women use humor to bond over the non-life threatening aspect of their new lives like loosing their femininity. It creates stronger social bonds because they all understand what one another is going through since they’ve been through it themselves. Cognitively, humor is used to separate oneself from the stresses of breast cancer. By making jokes about their situation, they are in a scary situation and taking back control. Humor allows them to acknowledge the hardships and decide that they don’t define them. They can use it as a type of defiance for the situation they were forced in to. In a neurological setting, survivors describe humor as a mental break, even though something of the opposite is actually occurring. Humor is “identifiable within neurological centers of positive emotion that allow the mind to perceive an emotional reward” (Bouskill, 228). Women who use humor to cope have showed signs of lower blood pressure and the social support they gain is associated with lower concentrations of cortisol. Complaining about their situation, on the other hand, is associated with high levels of cortisol. Linguistically, humor provides survivors with the opportunity to share their experience and help new comers to the “cancer world” do the same. They teach each other coping mechanisms and provide support that doesn’t limit itself to the support center. Many women are able to build lifelong friendships and support systems through this process. Humor can also be a bit exclusive as many people who have not experienced having breast cancer feel like it would be inappropriate for them to laugh at the struggles faced and can feel very uncomfortable when the jokes are made. Bouskill did a wonderful job of looking at a variety of aspects and influences when it comes to humor. She believes that it’s a disservice to focus on just one without the others since it’s a very complex web leading to a multitude of results. Some questions that I did have while reading this article dealt with the cultural aspect. Humor worked really well in the setting studied, but if this study were applied to a different culture or was conducted in another country, would humor still be as effective? Bouskill described how only some parts of the disease were found humorous, whereas subjects like death and the possibility of passing on genes to loved ones were not. How are these subjects addressed and coped with? For survivors who don’t find their situations humorous, how do they cope?
8 Comments
Brian Rivera
3/4/2019 02:00:52 pm
A couple of the chapters we have read close with a broad conclusion about how the chapter challenges biological determinism and shows how sociocultural factors shape our biology. Yet these chapters neither describe what is the challenge that biological determinism presents nor describe how is it that sociocultural factors that affect cognition (and the development of the nervous system) are outside the influence of biology. I feel these chapters share an assumption that culture is a force encountered out the world, independent of biology and cognition. Yet they fail to acknowledge the degree to which biology and cognition shaped these cultural forces to begin with. The collective patterns of physical movement in different martial arts, the way medical knowledge is kept and transferred across generations of different cultures, and the way humor is used for coping with illness were necessarily derived from nervous systems and their capacity for cognition way before they were instantiated as cultural practices. I fail to see an equal bidirectional relationship between culture and the nervous system and instead see that the channels which culture uses to influence the nervous system are but a selected few that have been biologically determined.
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Vanessa Marshall
3/5/2019 02:28:17 pm
Moe. This was such a good review. I couldn't help but impose my own experiences on this reading because a number of my friends' moms have gone through breast cancer. And looking back, I better understand my friends' and their moms' reactions to the situation. All experienced more stress, all developed a closer community with other women who had or were going through chemo, as well as a family friends that became confidants of sorts. And every single one of those women were humorous about the situation in social settings, as were the women in the study. This makes me wonder about their responses and use of (or lack of) humor in nonsocial situations. When struggling and alone, is humor still employed? Is humor employed when struggling with breast cancer and only a significant other is around? I think humor might be reserved, or at least used more in social situations and I'm curious how this plays out neurologically. Culturally, humor is rewarded, but what is the effect of humor or lack of when alone. That might be incredibly difficult to measure and study, but it might have an even greater impact on helping those with cancer.
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Zach Obaji
3/5/2019 03:11:47 pm
I think you did an excellent job summarizing and pointing out the main themes within the chapter. With previous work experience working at an oncology clinic, the thought of how certain patients coped crossed my mind on numerous occasions. Since cancer encompasses a large array of specific malignancies, cancer research has made tremendous progress in developing new and effective treatments. Now matter how mild ones prognosis is, the words "you have cancer" is all that is understood during a cancer diagnosis. Although cliche, laughter truly can be the best medicine. Both your chapter and blog posted included the fact that humor and coping were correlated with lower blood pressure levels and less cortisol in women with breast cancer. Any negative effects brought on by method of coping may impact a cancer's progression. Great job!
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Jennifer Fortunato
3/6/2019 08:26:01 am
Thanks for a great review Moe! I agree with Brian that this chapter did not do much to help further the understanding of how humor and alternative coping strategies change the way our nervous system develops. This chapter goes into the depth of how social coping strategies can assist with stress management, however, does not go into great deal about the cognitive of humor. Bouskill analyzes how humor has increased cohesiveness of social groups. With our previous reading of primate social evolution, I would have enjoyed further analysis of how humor, sociality and the nervous system are connected. I question whether humor is a biologically regulated trait or if it is only socially mediated. The humor being related with strong social support which lead to less cortisol, has me question whether these women are more or less likely to have lower cortisol in general. One caveat to that study would be that you do not have a baseline to compare the cortisol levels with.
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Elisabeth Nations
4/23/2019 12:20:54 pm
This chapter was such an interesting and informative read, and the concepts that it focuses on remind me of so many other situations we've learned about this semester. In Wretches and Jabberers, although they didn't explicitly focus on the power of humor in regards to autism, just the fact that the main characters chose to describe themselves as "wretches" speaks to a sense of humor about their lives, even if it's a bit bitter or ironic. It was powerful to hear so many classmates discuss their families' and friends' experiences with breast cancer and how they saw what was discussed in this chapter playing out in their loved ones' lives.
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Casey Fulkerson
4/23/2019 01:59:53 pm
I really appreciate how you acknowledged that even though awareness for breast cancer has increased exponentially, it can still be difficult for women fighting breast cancer to talk about their experiences and feelings because most of the population does not share their experience. I thought that this was an interesting chapter to read and an interesting in-class discussion. While most of, if not all of us, have no experience with using humor to cope with breast cancer, we do tend to use humor to cope with another stressful life event: college (insert scary music here). We most certainly use humor (oftentimes quite macabre) to make the actual or perceived stress that we experience with school much less threatening, just as Kathryn Bouskill says that women in breast cancer support groups do!
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Jennifer Fortunato
4/24/2019 07:18:03 am
I agree with Casey. While most of us did not have any experience with breast cancer humor specifically, most of us did have experience with a darker form of humor relating to college life and the stresses that can occur during it. I think our class discussion of this chapter helped us see that even if we couldn't relate specifically to the exact circumstance of the chapter we can understand where they are coming from.
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4/26/2022 02:36:45 am
Great article source to read. Thank you for sharing this.
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AuthorThis blog is group authored by Dr. DeCaro and the students in his ANT 474/574: Neuroanthropology. Archives
April 2019
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