Psycho Education 

In a paper published in Oncology Issues (18), Murphy-Ende indicated that “patient and family education is the core of all pain interventions.”  In another paper, Thomas and Weiss (17) indicated that patient psychoeducation resulted in an increase in likelihood that patients will continue with medication, a greater likelihood that the patient will believe that side effects could be prevented, and perceived themselves as having some personal control over their pain experience, and that patients were significantly less fearful about medications.  The concept of “mind-body interventions” is primarily based upon the assumption that there is a strong mind-body connection, and that our feelings, thoughts, and emotions, directly impact our biological, neurological and immunological systems.  Inherent within this theoretical assumption is the necessity of providing psychological, emotional, biological, and immunological information, which can be useful to the patient in self-management.   

Seligman, a well-known researcher in the field of psychology conducted a series of studies in which two groups of dogs were exposed to electric shock.  One group was provided a means of escape, another group was not.  He coined the phrase “learned helplessness” when he discovered that the dogs who received the electric shock, without a means of escape, developed symptoms of lethargy, inactivity, loss of appetite, and tended to behave helplessly, even when escape became possible.  Seligman suggested that “when people are unable to influence a situation that is important to them, they may not only give up trying to change that situation, they may also become depressed and show little initiative in new situations where success might be achieved (19).”  Although this is a rather simplistic approach to a complex problem like depression, this research does highlight the need for a sense of personal control in managing life experience.