Exploring the Phenomenon of “Cancer Ghosting”

Jennifer Stephens MA, PhD, RN, OCN, CCNE, University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming, discusses results from a netnographic study which explored the phenomenon of “cancer ghosting,” or the experience of family or friends withdrawing following a cancer diagnosis.

These results were first presented at the 2025 Oncology Nursing Society (ONS) Congress in Denver, Colorado. 

Transcript: 

Hello, this is Jennifer Stephens. I'm an assistant professor of nursing in the Fay W. Whitney School of Nursing, at the University of Wyoming, in lovely Laramie. At the Oncology Nursing Society [ONS] Congress down in Denver I gave a presentation on behalf of my research team, which includes Carlos Garcia, as a research assistant and he is a medical student in our WWAMI program, and Dr Jennifer Thomas, who is also with the school of nursing, she is a full professor and a psychologist. 

What we spoke about at ONS was the phenomenon of “cancer ghosting,” and when I asked the room who had heard of this before, only about 1/3 raised their hands. I first came to know “cancer ghosting” because I'm a 25-year cancer nurse, and I had never heard of this before, but in my research on the cancer patient experience I started hearing about this idea about being “ghosted” by family and friends. This was about 2 years ago, and I was very, very intrigued by this because it brought such emotional distress to people as they told their story. So, last year in 2024, I decided to create a research team of myself and Carlos and Jennifer, as a psychologist, to help understand the psychosocial impacts of “cancer ghosting” and then to describe what it even is. 

We did a thorough literature search and we couldn't find anything specific to this phenomenon associated in particular with web use. The idea of being “ghosted,” or “iced,” or “shined” started coming out in romantic texts and social media posts about 15 years ago. Everyone might understand the idea about being “ghosted” by a romantic partner, and what that means is basically that there's a sudden withdrawal of communication and the relationship is cut off and that's usually communicated through a means like a social media post or a text, so most of us will be familiar with the idea about a “romantic ghosting,” that the partner disappears, but what we have found in our work is that this phenomenon, this idea about being “cancer ghosted” started in 2019. Our study, because this is a web-based phenomenon, it seems to be mostly appearing in social media posts like Twitter, Facebook, etcetera and then sometimes in blogs or on social media lines like Reddit or LinkedIn and what we started finding as we did a netnographic analysis was that these posts start in around 2019. 

Now we decided to use netnography because it is an established, respected, qualitative method by Robert Kozinets, he wrote a great book on this and has since followed up with more methodological recommendations as well, so we followed the netnography process in that we went into the internet as a source of data and we did searches of keywords and phrases to help us find as many references, public references to “cancer ghosting” as possible. And the reason why I emphasize the word public is that we wanted an environmental scan, we wanted to know what was out there with “cancer ghosting” without having to do logins, without having to do an RRB, without having to potentially violate people's privacy through these more private means like online support groups and such. 

We did this environmental scan using the internet as our environment and what Carlos and I were able to find were 149 posts specifically referring to this phenomenon of “cancer ghosting”. And again, we are defining “cancer ghosting” as being abandoned suddenly through the withdrawal of communication by another person. In our presentation, we spoke a little bit about these posts, most of these are on Twitter, which is now known as X, but I'm an old-timer, so I say Twitter, but we found a lot on Reddit and quite a few on LinkedIn and then we have other things like Facebook and such, and most of these posts have been in the last 2 or 3 years. We have a chart which shows the absence of “cancer ghosting” as a phenomenon and then it rises up to 2024 and we anticipate that this is a phrase, a technique, a way that cancer survivors are going to have to deal with increasingly, just due to the data that we found supporting this. 

In our presentation, we spoke on these 149 posts and our findings which have several themes. A lot of netnography is about following qualitative methodology and then you code the data, and in netnography you do different creative things to try to understand the posts, that web-based material that you are looking at. In our presentation, we talked about 3 themes which have been expanded on in an upcoming manuscript, which I will talk briefly about at the end of this discussion. We had themes like abandonment, a loss of support, and really a big one for us was that of a decrease of quality of life, obviously, but also of cancer stigma. What we have found through our “cancer ghosting” work is that people are mostly “ghosted” by and talk about the “ghosting” experience from family members. Parents for example are predominant in the “ghosting” posts that we examined, and then of course by a boyfriend or girlfriend, with the third category really being in workmates or that kind of friend. What we find is that people will write about [this experience] as soon as they reveal that cancer diagnosis [and] will quickly result in a complete withdrawal, so the “ghosting” of the person by this colleague, friend, family, mother, whomever.

What we also discuss in an upcoming manuscript is that there is a tremendous amount of rationalization present in the posts that we've examined– It’s such a painful experience psychologically for the person being ghosted that they then go on to try to rationalize why this happened, why this person that they believed in and trusted and was part of their close social group, why did this person suddenly abandoned them because of cancer. And this is something that I have written about, is this idea of a cancer stigma, which is not only person-to-person, but it's a social stigma as well, so that is something that we explore more in our manuscript. Because people are rationalizing this and it provides us proof of this psychological experience of being abandoned and “ghosted”, what we then in our presentation and in our upcoming manuscript reflect on how that the oncology provider can potentially help or assist or somehow address this experience of “ghosting”, which again, we know is getting more common.

In the presentation we introduced that part of our work that is developing a 3-question tool for providers to use during assessments. This tool not only asks about social media use, again, because we are specifically looking at this “cancer ghosting” as a social media/web phenomenon, but we also ask about “ghosting,” what is it, have you experienced this, so being very forthright in remembering during an assessment to ask the cancer patient that you're working with, do you use social media and have you been abandoned, has someone abandoned you because of a cancer diagnosis. And I think that bringing this up and now acknowledging as health care providers that this is a real thing that is happening to people and it's not their fault, but we need to address it and we need to bring it into our caregiving reality that it does exist. I think that this is really, really critical for us. 

The other thing that we do, we touched a little bit on it in our presentation, is not only support people in partaking of online support groups, which seems to be the number one way in which folks are exploring how to deal with ghosting seems to be through online interactions and working with members of their cancer support groups, whether that's a general cancer support group or a specific diagnosis support group. We also suggested in our presentation and in an upcoming manuscript, specific therapeutic ways, so using therapy and using different theoretical models around stigma and abandonment specific to cancer, how that perhaps this kind of counseling, for example, there's something called the acceptance and commitment theory, so there is a type of therapy from this that we believe that we're suggesting could also help with folks who are really struggling after being abandoned by significant other people in their life. 

That's what we spoke about at ONS, this is a real passion of mine and my team. We are moving on to a phase 2 research project, which we're actually recruiting for right now, which is a critical incident theory method of asking people in short, quick interviews to describe the particular “cancer ghosting” incidents. We are recruiting and we would love to be connected to cancer patients who want to give that brief interview and describe their “cancer ghosting” experience. This is the work that we're doing here at the University of Wyoming on “cancer ghosting.” It is important work, it is innovative work, and it is absolutely a topic and phenomenon that we need to understand more and that we need to explore with our patients. Thank you for listening and I appreciate your support. 

Source: 

Stephens J, Garcia C, and Thomas J. The experience of being cancer ghosted: A netnographic study. Presented at the ONS Congress. April 10-13, 2025; Denver, CO.