The Existential Dispatch, Issue No. 28

A Word from the Founding Director

This issue follows a difficult thread: the way illness can unsettle a life story, while fragmented systems can deepen that unsettlement. Recent work on existential suffering in cancer care, visual narrative, global cancer equity, and AI-enabled health platforms asks what it means to preserve a person’s reality when institutions are under pressure to move faster. The existential is not outside healthcare; it is present wherever a person must make a life within uncertainty.

Existential Thinker of the Issue

Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker (1924–1974) made the denial of death a central key to modern life. His formulation is deliberately unsettling: what a culture calls normal may sometimes be an organised refusal to face finitude, dependence, vulnerability, or the limits of control. In clinical settings, that provocation can open a more honest conversation about what care is trying to protect—and what it may be avoiding.

“The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny for man.”

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (quotation source): en.wikiquote.org

Clinically, Becker’s sentence is not a licence to label patients as defensive. It is an invitation to examine the system around them. Are we rushing past grief because the schedule cannot hold it? Calling dependence a failure because autonomy is easier to measure? Treating mortality as a technical endpoint rather than a lived horizon? A more truthful practice makes room for fear, ambivalence, dignity, and the patient’s own account of what must still be faced.

In Academia

When care encounters become part of the suffering

A July qualitative study in the Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences interviewed ten Finnish women with current or previous cancer. It found that fragmented care and loss of continuity could intensify existential suffering, while compassionate, person-centred encounters and human connection could alleviate it—even when the technical care was correct. pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Drawing a life after incurable cancer

A PLOS One study of 38 people living with incurable cancer used repeated hand-drawn “Rich Pictures” to examine narrative meaning-making over time. Six strategies—repeating, retaining, repurposing, reinforcing, reducing, and reassembling—show how illness stories remain unfinished and how arts-based work can support new ways of relating to a disruptive diagnosis. journals.plos.org

In Film, Literature and Culture

The Summer Book: grief without sentimentality

A Guardian review of the new adaptation of Tove Jansson’s 1972 novel describes a grandmother, her recently widowed son, and her young granddaughter facing grief on an island in the Gulf of Finland. The film’s quiet attention to life, death, family, and the possibility of an older person’s disappearance makes it a useful cultural companion to questions of finitude and intergenerational care. theguardian.com

In Healthcare (Global)

Cancer equity is a systems question

The WHO’s Global status report on cancer 2026 brings together disease burden, health-system capacity, lived experience, palliative care, survivorship, and the social and economic consequences of cancer. Its three proposed shifts—better capabilities, better protections, and better value—make equity more than a distributional concern: they ask whose life is protected by the system, and whose losses remain normalised. who.int

Funding and Grant Opportunities

Horizon Europe Cancer Mission calls

The open 2026 calls include “Earlier and more precise palliative care,” “Boosting mental health of young cancer survivors,” and “Improve the Quality of Life of older cancer patients.” Deadline: September 15, 2026. The EANM listing directs applicants to the full Funding & Tenders Portal conditions. eanm.org

Digital Europe: Advanced Digital Skills for AI Uptake in Health

A Digital Europe call listed by EANM supports advanced digital skills for AI uptake in health. Deadline: October 1, 2026. For existentially informed innovation, the opportunity is a reminder that technical capability and ethical imagination must be developed together. eanm.org

Conferences and Events

Australian and New Zealand Society of Palliative Medicine 2026 Conference

September 24–26 in Launceston, Tasmania. The conference appears on MASCC’s current supportive-care events calendar and offers a regional meeting point for palliative medicine, clinical practice, education, and the relational work of care. mascc.org

Society for Integrative Oncology 2026

The International Conference of the Society for Integrative Oncology runs September 29–October 1 in Detroit. Its placement alongside supportive-care and oncology meetings makes it a timely setting for asking how whole-person approaches can be evaluated without reducing the person to another outcome measure. mascc.org

Startup and Innovation Watch

Genie Health: continuity as a product question

Singapore startup Genie Health launched Genie, a consumer health guide, and Genie SmartCare, a provider-focused agentic AI platform, on August 5. The tools organise reports, wearable data, family history, patient engagement, and clinical summaries; the existential test is whether a more continuous record helps a person be heard, rather than merely making their data easier to move. prnewswire.com

To Close: An Existential Joke

Why did the existentialist refuse the patient portal?

It kept asking him to accept the terms and conditions of existence.