Paper short abstract:

I explore the patterns of resilience of women with breast cancer in Southern Italy, an area that can be considered a 'South within the North'. The illness is often experienced as one difficulty among many in their lives, and family, community and religion are among the resources mobilised to cope.

Paper long abstract:

Italy is characterised by structural inequalities between an industrial and relatively affluent north and a more economically fragile south. These inequalities extend to the domain of health and healthcare, and experiences of cancer can be significantly different between the north and the south of Italy. Southern Italy is a perfect context to explore the 'Souths within the North' and to analyse how contradictions within more economically developed areas reflect also in illness experiences. Using interviews conducted with southern Italian women with breast cancer, I explore local patterns of resilience within the experiences of the patients and show how these patterns are defined by the social and cultural resources that the women interviewed can access in the context in which they live. Many of the interviewees described their illness experience as one difficulty within a larger life story characterised by problems and obstacles, a perspective that in some cases helped relativise the impact of the illness and of the adjustments they needed to make in their lives. The capacity to cope with the illness emerges, explicitly or implicitly, as a key resource to manage the illness in a context characterised by a health-care system that, while universalistic and advanced, is often considered unreliable. Religion and support from family and the larger community are further important resources that the women were able to recur to in order to cope with and give meaning to their illness.