Reflecting on photos helps young cancer survivors regain confidence: Study

New Delhi, Dec 04 (ANI): While young cancer survivors face medical and psychological challenges and lack self-confidence even years after their final treatment, new research suggests survivors who retell their story through photography can significantly increase their self-esteem and self-efficacy. Two years after receiving their final treatments, 18 leukaemia survivors -- diagnosed as teenagers -- participated in the Framed Portrait Experience, an intervention which integrates therapeutic photography and re-enactment therapy. In the study by researchers at the University of Houston and the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, Italy, where the intervention was developed, participants were empowered to express emotions connected to their illness in order to make meaning of their experience. The results of the study were published in the Journal of Adolescent and Young Adult Oncology. Working with a portrait photographer who was also a licensed social worker, the survivors c