Depression and Pain in Your Head?
Dealing with Brain Injury symptoms and consequences quite frequently, I am exposed to the contention that Depression is the culprit when it comes to the subjectivity of pain. Subjective pain is that which is rated according to the one complaining, not the observer. Objective pain is that which can be observed independent of the one complaining.
Brain Injured Victims are often accused of malingering pain symptoms as a result of being depressed. And the depression is dismissed as a personality flaw or pre-existing a brain injury.
Well this is the what came first argument: the chicken or the egg. Certainly there is medical support for the statistics of depressed patients being more likely to report subjective pain symptoms. Also there are statistics supporting the evidence that pain leads to depression.
It is difficult to weed out the two but that difficulty is not justification to dismiss complaints of pain due to depression or depression being the true source of pain.
When it comes to pain, the two competing schools of thought are that it's either "all in your head" or "all in your body". A new study led by University of Oxford researchers indicates that, instead, pain is an amalgam of the two. Dr. Chantal Berna and colleagues used brain imaging to see how healthy volunteers responded to pain while feeling low.
The article is "Induction of Depressed Mood Disrupts Emotion Regulation Neurocircuitry and Enhances Pain Unpleasantness" by Chantal Berna, et al. Berna, is affiliated with The Centre for Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the Brain, Department of Clinical Neurology and Nuffield Department of Anaesthetics, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom.
The article appeared in Biological Psychiatry, Volume 67, Issue 11 (June 1, 2010), published by Elsevier. The authors' disclosures of financial and conflicts of interests are available in the article.
