Managing Your Mental Health After Cancer
- Christina Applegate, 52, says her character in “Dead to Me” dealt with grief, and it unlocked untapped emotions deep inside her, causing her to seek therapy and grapple with her mental health after filming the show.
- Applegate was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) in the middle of filming “Dead to Me” in 2021. The chronic condition causes numbness or tingling in the limbs.
- Although there is no cure for multiple sclerosis, several treatment options help manage symptoms. Common tools MS patients use to improve their quality of life include wheelchairs, canes, leg braces, and medical treatments called disease-modifying therapies (DMTs), which can slow the progression of the disease.
- The “Married with Children” star also bravely battled breast cancer after a 2008 diagnosis. She underwent a double mastectomy (removal of both breasts).
Christina Applegate, 52, star of ‘Dead to Me,’ revealed that her character’s frequent battles with grief deeply resonated with her. This intense connection blurred the lines between fiction and reality, compelling Applegate to seek therapy to manage her own mental health off-screen.
“Jen, my character, is grieving in the worst way possible, but that’s her way,” Applegate told Variety.
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“Dead to Me” ran from 2019 to 2022. It follows two women who lost loved ones and follows their journey of coping. In the middle of filming the series, Applegate was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS), a chronic condition that causes numbness or tingling in the limbs.
Twelve years after battling breast cancer, Christina Applegate has been diagnosed with MS. The emotional toll of such diagnoses can be overwhelming, often complicating the management of the physical symptoms.
Living with Multiple Sclerosis
Applegate’s Health Journeys With Multiple Sclerosis and Breast Cancer
Applegate has been living with multiple sclerosis since August 2021. The diagnosis came more than a decade after she dealt with breast cancer in 2008.
“With the disease of MS, it’s never a good day,” Applegate previously wrote on her Instagram.
Applegate’s breast cancer journey began in April 2008 at just 36 years old.
“I went through five weeks of work without telling anyone that this was going on in my life,” she said during a CNN interview.
Applegate said she had dense breasts and would need more thorough examinations for her routine mammogram screenings.
“He suggested that I get an MRI,” the actress said.
Dr. Connie Lehman, Chief of the Breast Imaging Division at Mass General Hospital, says dense breast tissue is more challenging to see through.
WATCH: What to know about dense breasts.
“The fatty breast tissue has a gray appearance, so an X-ray beam just runs right through it. But the dense structures block the X-ray. And so that looks white. Unfortunately, cancers also block the X-ray, so cancers also look white. When you have a white cancer hiding in white, dense breast tissue, it can be missed,” Dr. Lehman explains.
It’s recommended that women with dense breasts undergo 3D mammograms, which can be more effective.
When Applegate underwent an MRI screening, something was off.
“They found some funky things going on [in one breast],” she said.
A biopsy confirmed her diagnosis, but luckily, the cancer was caught early. Despite her prognosis, she was still very concerned with her diagnosis.
She then turned her worry into determination, and she focused her efforts on beating the cancer. She underwent a lumpectomy, which is a procedure that removes the tumor and some of the surrounding tissue.
For early-stage breast cancer, studies have shown that lumpectomy plus radiation is as effective a treatment in preventing breast cancer recurrence as mastectomy (the removal of the breast).
Applegate then underwent six weeks of radiation, using high-energy beams aimed at the cancer cells to kill them.
During treatment, she learned she tested positive for the BRCA gene, increasing her risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer.
“That sort of changed everything for me. Radiation was something temporary, and it wasn’t addressing the issue of this coming back or the chance of it coming back in my left breast. I sort of had to kind of weigh all my options at that point,” she explained.
The harmful variant of BRCA1 or BRCA2 is inherited from either or both of your parents. So, each offspring of a parent who carries the mutation has a 50% chance of inheriting it.
WATCH: Testing for the BRCA gene mutation.
“Patients with a strong family history of breast cancer or ovarian cancer or patients who have a diagnosis of a couple of breast cancers in their lifetime will be at higher risk,” University of Maryland breast medical oncologist Dr. Kate Tkaczuk explains.
The actress’ doctor gave her treatment options, but she ultimately opted for a preventative double mastectomy, which removes both breasts to reduce cancer risk. When a woman undergoes a double mastectomy, it is a personal and emotional decision that impacts how they feel about themselves.
“It just seemed like, ‘I don’t want to have to deal with this again. I don’t want to keep putting that stuff in my body. I just want to be done with this,’ and I was just going to let them go,” she explained.
Just before the procedure, Applegate said she staged her “first and last nude photo shoot” so she could remember her breasts. Just before the surgery began, Applegate admitted she began to cry.
“The floodgates just opened up, and I lost it…It’s also a part of you that’s gone, so you go through a grieving process and a mourning process,” Dr. Tkaczuk explained.
“A double mastectomy typically takes about two hours for the cancer part of the operation, the removing of the tissue,” Dr. Elisa Port, Chief of Breast Surgery at Mount Sinai Health System, told SurvivorNet in a previous chat. “The real length, the total length of the surgery, can often depend on what type of reconstruction [a patient] has.”
WATCH: What happens during a double mastectomy.
Dr. Port added that most women opt to have some reconstruction. The length of these surgeries can vary. When implants are used, the procedure can take two to three hours (so the total surgery time would be around five hours). There is also the option to take one’s own tissue (usually from the belly area) and transfer it into the breast area, but this is a much longer procedure.
Since Applegate’s breast cancer journey began, she’s advocated for women to undergo the necessary screenings for early detection.
Coping With Your Mental Health After a Diagnosis
According to Mental Health America, “56% of adults with a mental illness receive no treatment, and over 27 million individuals experiencing a mental illness are going untreated.”
While millions of people have unmet mental health needs, the need for mental health resources is even greater among cancer patients and their families.
Research published in Epidemiology and Psychiatric Sciences found that “35 to 40 percent of cancer patients have a diagnosable psychiatric disorder,” and the number of people experiencing mental health challenges is “higher among cancer patients with advanced stages of cancer and in palliative care settings.”
WATCH: How Genetic Testing Can Help Determine the Right Form of Mental Health Treatment.
Dr. Asher Aladjem, a board-certified psychiatrist at NYU Langone, tells SurvivorNet, “Anxiety is a protective and normal kind of symptom.”
“Sometimes the anxiety gets to the point that things stand in the way of the scan or whatever the test is, and people avoid it and run away from it. Treating the anxiety allows for the completion of the workup or the treatment or whatever the situation may be in a much more effective way,” Dr. Aladjem said.
Dr. Alagjem encourages patients to advocate for their mental health. He reminds us that even if mental health services are not offered while undergoing physical treatment for a diagnosis, patients can still ask their care team about them.
“We are trying to advocate for patients to be able to get the services that they need with whatever support they may need – whether it’s medications or therapy or nursing staff,” Dr. Alagjem added.
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