
Psychology
The every-day life teaches us that there is a continuity between mind e body and that, without the mind health, it is not possible to have a healthy body. The World Health Organization (WHO) confirms this idea providing the international definition of “health”: health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. The medical science the life sciences confirmed the existence of a parallelism between body and mind. For this reason, the care of body and mind goes at the same pace. MediClinic can provide a highly qualified psychological assistance. The Department can treat patients affected by various types psychic disorders or that were affected by a traumatic event, or simply for patients that want to receive assistance to better overcome difficulties linked to their disease.
At the Psychology Department a patient can perform different treatments in the psychological field:
- consult
- psycho-diagnostic exam
- neuro-psychologic evaluation (monitor and evaluation of the cognitive functions)
- integrated orientation to psychotherapy pathway, with the possibility to perform the EMDR therapy
Who should schedule this appointment?
The support and therapy pathways are thought for adults or young adults, to couples and to families.
The aim of the therapy is to verify and change distress situations that the patient lives. It also aims to improve the results in the sporting area, to recovery after an injury and to develop competences that can help the individual to deal with clinical symptoms and situations perceived as critical (for example relational difficulties, separations, traumatic experiences, diseases, sexual dysfunctions, food disorders, chronic pains, abuses, bereavements,…).
Why choose MediClinic?
The Psychology Departments in MediClinic uses an integrated multimodal therapeutic approach. This approach allows to handle the patient’ distress using different methods, that have been validated and shared by the international scientific community. This approach makes the helpful approach completer and more efficient, because it allows to the patient, together with the psychologist, to find the best solution for his/her problem.
In order to obtain the best results, it is essential for the psychologist to collaborate with other physicians. This pathway is customized for each patient, according to everyone’s needs.
Il percorso di assistenza
During the first consultation, the therapist starts a dialog and a pathway that starts with the verification and the awareness acquisition of the distress’ situations that the patient lives. According to the patient’s need and to each situation, the therapist created a customized pathway, considering the link between mind and body. Frequently a physical pathology (for example chronic pathologies or patients that perform dialysis) can lead to consequences to the psychological field and vice versa: for example, under phycological stress conditions can activate some mechanisms at the cerebral level that can interfere with the pain perception and can trigger/worsen some physical suffering conditions. The pathway depends entirely of the patient’s need and awareness.
Patients motivated to deeply deal with their distress or problem can perform a psychotherapy pathway, made of multiple sessions performed with regular frequency, that can last some months.
The psycho-diagnostic exam is included for patients that start a psychotherapy pathway.
The neuro-psychological evaluation evaluates, with the help of some tests, the cognitive functions (memory, learning, language, executive functions,…) and provides, for example, important information about a cognitive deterioration or about on-going pathologies (for example encephalopathies, hypo- and hyperthyroidism, metabolic disorders, non-neurological medical conditions,…).
For sportsmen (adults and children) we offer a phycological support to develop the performances, to improve the mental preparation and to recovery after injuries. The therapy provides for a series of sessions that aim to reach the targets that the patient set.
EMDR Method
MediClinic offers the possibility to perform the EMDR therapy, that is the Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing. This method was created to treat the post-traumatic stress disorder. Nowadays is a method consolidated with international protocols and is used to threat traumas that the patient can experience during his/her life.
The EMDR is used basically to point out, neutralize and create an adaptive resolution for all those traumatic experiences that are located at the basis of the modern psychological disorders. These traumatic experiences may consist on:
- small/big traumas experienced during the growth
- stressing experiences (bereavements, chronic diseases, financial losses, conjugal clashes, changings)
- stressing events beyond the normal human experience, like natural disasters (earthquakes, floods) of disasters provoked by the
- human being (serious accidents, tortures, violence).
The EMDR is a complex but well-structured approach that can be integrated with other programs to improve their effectiveness. It considers all the aspects that derive from a stressing or traumatic experience. This method uses the eyes movements or other left/right stimulation techniques to re-establish the inhibitory/excitatory balance, improving the communication with the cerebral hemispheres. In other words, the EMDR uses a natural neurophysiological process that is linked to the quick information elaboration. (for more information, visit www.edmr.com).
This approach needs a deep initial evaluation and it allow to obtain good results in a short period. In some cases, symptoms disappear after the first sessions.
The psychotherapy service and the psychological help for chronic pain
If acute pain is the physiologic reaction to a damage/lesion of a part of the body (trauma, inflammation, etc.) and it disappears once the pathology has been treated, the chronic pain is a pathological pain that lasts from at least 6 months and/or persists after the recovery of the original pathology.
Chronic pain isn’t only a pain that lasts in time but, differently from acute pain, tends to become an debilitating pathology that affects the patient and his/her cognitive and emotional functions, his/her life and relations. The impact of chronic pain in the life quality can be relevant.
Frequently the patient reports to feel alone with his/her pain and not understood by people that minimize and do not understand suffering condition that is not caused by an organic pathology or disease. However, the pain that affects a patient that suffers of this pathology is real and it has not to be delegitimized.
Why the psychotherapy?
Pain feeling is a subjective experience that is processed by some neuronal circuits in our brain and in our central nervous system. Chronic pain can produce physiological and structural changes, provoking a mental imbalance and keeping active and/or intense our pain feeling, even when the pain cause has been overpassed.
During the last years, new techniques that can influence the pain feeling neuronal circuits have been developed. They can help in:
- cognitive and emotional aspects linked to a painful trauma (for example car crash) that do not allow to the pain sensation neuronal circuit to spontaneously disappear
- stress condition that makes pain less responsive to physical and pharmacological therapies.
Why is it useful the support of a psychologist?
The psychological approach to the chronic pain is a consequence of the correlation between emotional-cognitive element, the physical pain sensation and the consequent stress condition. Moreover, physical pain is always accompanied and influenced by an emotive sufferance. Negative feelings and the traumatic memory of the painful experience tend to keep active the pain feeling and to facilitate the outcoming of acute episodes.
Consequently, our ability to face and manage pain is compromised by its persistence; in this situation, the potential risk is to feel inactive and unable. In these cases, a group experience allows to the individual to:
- get a social support with the sharing of the experience
- understand the implied dynamics of the painful experience that undermine the personal auto-efficacy sense.
- develop efficient strategies to face with pain and recover independence.
The most common forms of chronic pain are:
- primary headache (for example migraine, tension headache, cluster headache)
- cervical, dorsal and/or lumbar back pain
- neuropathic pain (for example post-herpetic neuralgias or post-inflammatory pain)
- oro-facial pain (for example trigeminal pain, temporo-mandibular joint dysfunctional syndrome)
- muscular-skeletal pain (myofascial pain, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome)