Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu (It is how well you live that matters, not how long) is what  Lucius Anneus Seneca underlined in his stoic message where a good quality of life, in spite of negative events, should be pursued and reached by having one’s own soul based on values and a life carried in search for meaning.

Psychosocial oncology, as a research and clinical care field, has shown over the last 30 that years how to help cancer patients to contrast the devastating effects of cancer and cancer treatment and how to reach a sense of coherence and adjustment along the trajectory of the disease. Diagnosing and curing the most important psychological disorders, eliciting patients needs and responding and taking care of them are the aims of psychosocial oncology programs worldwide. In the presentation the most important issues related to the implementation and diffusion of psychosocial oncology, the challenges in research and clinical care and the importance of the culture (including the history of the person, the family structure and religion) will be presented. The collaboration between psychosocial oncologists and psycho-oncology societies around the world, as a way to increase the strength of the discipline, will be also discussed.