Did you know that mental health and chronic pain are intrinsically linked? It’s true. A person’s mental health can impact how they experience pain, and vice-versa. So it should be no surprise that mental health challenges can make chronic pain worse. Doctors see it all the time.
The experts at KindlyMD, a group of integrative healthcare clinics scattered across Utah, say every patient experiencing both mental health issues and chronic pain does not face a serious crisis on either front. But many do. And when mental health challenges make chronic pain worse, it is too easy for a vicious cycle to develop.
Pain Perceptions and Experiences
Pain is a curious thing. Even without mental health challenges to face, a person’s perception of pain can be impacted by past experiences and current thoughts. Let us say you had an especially painful experience when visiting the dentist as a child. That experience has left you with the perception that dental work is always painful. Therefore, even a gentle cleaning could be painful as an adult.
The reality of pain perceptions and experiences can be exacerbated by mental health challenges. A person struggling with depression or anxiety can blow past experiences out of proportion, potentially leading to an amplified pain perception and a lower pain tolerance.
Coping With Pain Is More Difficult
For the most part, pain is a symptom of something else being wrong. There is no cure for pain itself. So what are we left with? Treating the symptom of pain and, if that doesn’t help, finding coping mechanisms. By the way, there’s nothing wrong with coping. It is a normal human response to all sorts of circumstances.
The challenge where mental health is concerned is continuing to find healthy coping mechanisms. The reality is that poor mental health has a tendency to inhibit a person’s ability to cope. In addition, poor mental health can lead to negative thought patterns that exacerbate the pain experience.
Mental Health and Treatment Adherence
Healthcare providers are further challenged when mental health issues interfere with treatment adherence. Imagine a patient who cannot be relied on to consistently take medications prescribed for depression and anxiety. Will that patient be just as unreliable with chronic pain treatments? The likelihood is pretty high.
The thing about chronic pain is that it is notoriously difficult to treat. Even when treatment plans are adhered to strictly, they don’t always yield expected results. So when a patient isn’t adhering to treatment guidelines, success can be even more fleeting.
Not adhering to treatment plans creates yet another problem: doctors have no real way of assessing whether or not their treatment plans are appropriate. They have no baseline from which to measure success or failure because the plan is not being followed.
A Vicious Cycle Begins
So, what happens when all these things come into play? A vicious cycle begins. Poor mental health exacerbates the pain experience. In turn, the patient becomes more sensitive to pain even if there has been no real change in its intensity.
A higher response to pain creates mental and emotional stress, thereby contributing to poorer mental health. Increased depression and anxiety lead to more pain; more pain increases depression and anxiety. It becomes a vicious cycle that is increasingly harder to break as time goes on.
There is no easy solution for such cases. But clinics like KindlyMD are warming up to the idea of integrative medicine. By combining multiple disciplines with every available treatment, there is the possibility of breaking the cycle and restoring a patient to mental and physical health.