Narratives about Cancer: What Metaphors can tell us about Depressive Symptoms in Breast Cancer Patients

ABSTRACT

Metaphors are pervasive in cancer discourse. However, little is known about how metaphor use develops over time within the same patient, and how metaphor use and its content relate to the mental health of the patient. Here, we analyzed metaphor use in personal essays written by breast cancer patients shortly after the time of diagnosis and nine months later, in relation to their depressive symptoms at both time points. Results show that metaphor use can provide important insight into a patient’s current mental state. Specifically, patients who had no change in their depressive symptom levels used metaphors more densely after nine months. In addition, metaphor valence in the later essay was associated with depressive symptoms at study entry and nine months after. Lastly, we observed a shift in metaphor reference pattern for different symptom trajectories, such that those who recovered from initially elevated depressive symptoms used fewer self-referencing metaphors and more cancer-referencing metaphors in their later essay. Our work suggests that metaphor use reflects how a patient is coping with their diagnosis.

Acknowledgements

We thank Dr. Annette Stanton for her contributions to the original data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data available upon request from the corresponding author.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2023.2245989

Notes

1. We used a Welch-t-test here because one participant did not use any metaphors in Essay 1 and therefore, our samples could not be paired. Note that a Welch’s t-test is a statistically more conservative test.

Additional information

Funding

The data acquired in this study (K.W.L.) were supported by the National Cancer Institute, [Grant/Award Number: NCI‐NIH P30 CA 16042, NCI‐NIH P30CA023074 and NIH R01 CA133081]; and the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. V.T.L. was supported by [NSF# 2140897]