Fighting Cancer With a Pen

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"Basically, we were trying to stick to thoughts and feelings rather than the facts," she said. "Writing about facts doesn't get you anywhere."

"A lot of them wrote in the survey, 'I hate thinking about cancer but writing helped me process it and I feel better, it helped me create a script of things I want to say to my family.' They were saying they just couldn't deal and writing helped them deal," said Morgan, a writing clinician and director of Lombardi's Arts & Humanities Program.

Expressive writing has now been incorporated into the hospital's arts and humanities program and is part of general patient orientation, when Morgan makes a presentation and hands out blank journals.

Some trial participants have incorporated the practice into their lives.

"I started writing updates for relatives and close friends, and I still do that to this day," two years after the trial, Irwin said. "They just about always reply."

Sandi Stromberg teaches a class, "Journaling: The Healing Power of Story," for patients and caregivers at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.

"They say, 'I don't want to just sit here moaning about my cancer or my loved one's cancer," she said. "For cancer patients, the whole story becomes cancer. They forget they led perfectly normal, functioning lives before cancer."

Stromberg uses non-cancer related prompts such as "Write about your first car." Invariably, the patients want to share what they've written, and they bond strongly to each other.

"One time I had a man, I didn't think he would take part, and he did, and he started to cry," Stromberg recalled. "The woman next to him had the same cancer and was a four-year survivor. She put her hand on his wrist and said, 'I understand right where you are.' And he looked at her, and he said, 'Thank you,' with a big smile on his face."

More information

Visit the University of Texas for practical information on writing and health.