Bio-Based Psychotherapy

As a medical discipline Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy has gained increasing importance within society since given the epidemiological importance of behavioural problems in childhood and adolescence, it has verifiably improved the developmental chances of children at high risk. Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Psychotherapy therefore should be systematically integrated into the German Medical Curriculum. The bio-psycho-social model provides us with a comprehensive paradigm of psychiatric disorders and has to face the problem of hermeneutics...

PURPOSE OF REVIEW: This work outlines a psychodynamic approach to ocular allergies, picking up the emotional issues related to the topic of eye out of the psychodynamic and psychosomatic literature and connecting them to a strategy of multidisciplinary treatment based on a therapeutic network that meets the unconscious patient's distresses, particularly those relating to the anxiety of abandonment, to the emotional nonmirroring and to the aspects of envy. RECENT FINDINGS: More specifically is considered a modern psychodynamic approach able to link together the particular depth of pathology (in terms of its physiological changes) with the analogous depth of conflict and its psychological defences and able to intervene through a medical-psychological network according to the systemic criteria of the eco-bio-psychology...

Psychotherapy and psycho-social interventions in oncological rehabilitation, based on confirmed results of several controlled studies designed and conducted in a bio-psycho-social research framework, have been proved to reduce the psycho-social vulnerability of cancer patients and to enhance health related quality of life in this patient population. It is also supposed that psychological intervention increases survival outcomes of cancer patients through immune-modulation. Findings of psycho-neuro-immunological research have underlined that the human neurological and immunological system, mainly the NK, CD4 and CD8 cell activity and cytotoxicity, are mediators and modulators in the progress of malignant tumors...

BACKGROUND: Many people have asthma, and for some their symptoms may be triggered by psychological factors. In addition compliance with medical therapy may have a psychological dimension. Therefore, psychological interventions aim to reduce the burden of symptoms and improve management of the disease. OBJECTIVES: To assess the effectiveness of psychological interventions for adults with asthma. SEARCH STRATEGY: The Cochrane Airways Group Specialised Register and PsycINFO were searched with pre-defined terms up until August 2005...

Depressive disorders in patients with coronary heart disease (CHD) are connected with negative effects on the course of the cardiac disease. Until today there has been no clear etiological model to explain the interaction of depressive disorders and cardiac risk parameters. Both, somatic and behavioural aspects seem to be important. Depressive symptoms are a serious risk factor for CHD-patients demanding for a broad bio-psychosocial treatment conception in cardiac rehabilitation. Most intervention studies have mainly focussed on the reduction of depressive and anxious symptoms in CHD-patients without co-morbid mental disorders...

The development of psychosocial and psychosomatic medicine in Switzerland is as diverse as the country itself with its four official languages and 26 cantons. Psychosomatic medicine of the past and present can be seen in three phases: Psychogenesis of somatic diseases ( phase 1: from about 1930-1960), bio-psycho-social medicine (phase 2: from 1960-1990) and psychobiology in medicine (phase 3: since 1990). In Switzerland the first phase scarcely noticeable, whereas active development in all fields of psychosomatic medicine and psychotherapy has taken place since 1960...

BACKGROUND: This study was designed to develop and validate the ADAPT (Assessment of the Demand for Additional Psychological Treatment), a questionnaire assessing the demand for disease-oriented counseling (DOC), integrated psychosomatic care (IPC), and psychotherapy (PT) in chronically ill patients on the example of inflammatory bowel diseases (IBDs). METHODS: After its development, the ADAPT was distributed to 39 IBD patients along with the Hospital Anxiety and Depression scale (HAD), the Rating Form of IBD Patient Concerns (RFIPC), and a questionnaire on social support (SOZU-K22)...

The reference framework for those disciplines that deal with the functions of the nervous system has a very simple basic structure: It becomes clear when, based on the matrix with the four central questions of biological research (causation, ontogeny, adaptation, phylogeny), one asks and at the same time takes the reference levels (e.g. cell, organ, individual, group) at which the questions are aimed into account (the questions and planes in bold are also the subject of the humanities). This "bio-psycho-social" orientation framework is the basis for the development of an interdisciplinary consensus: It is the starting point for a systematic order for those disciplines, and also the basis for a consistent networking and structuring of their results...

UNLABELLED: The objective was to propose and describe a new bio-psycho-social model of emergence and maintenance of anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa, and demonstrate its application to treatment. An original model, based on literature review and our own clinical experience, was created. Therapeutic guidelines were derived from the theoretical model and applied in the treatment of 97 anorexia and bulimia nervosa patients presented at the eating disorders unit at Kaplan Hospital in Israel over 18 months...

The compulsory detention and involuntary treatment of mentally disordered offenders is fraught with conceptual difficulties relating to liberty and the protection of others from harm. It is often the case in forensic psychiatry that patients consider themselves unjustly treated and unfairly judged, which may result in some engaging in protest behaviour. This paper is concerned with setting out some philosophical positions in relation to such loss of liberty and forced treatment, and views the protest scenario as a form of hostage situation...

Integrated psychotherapy according to Barolin wants to be embedded in the general health system and regards the whole "bio-psychosocial entity of man" using psychical means, which can take psychotropic as well as somatotropic effect. It should come out of an isolated ivory tower and seek coordination with each and everyone dealing with the "human entity": medical (like medication, physiotherapy, etc.), nursing, social work, administration, etc. Psychotherapeutic "schools" should serve as a solid base of learning...

Public opinion is more and more concerned about the fate of victims of sexual violence and sexual abuse. Until now the focus of scientific research concerned the most appropriate approach of children and women as the main victims of male sexual offenders. We need more research on the psychopathology of sexuality and aggression in order to develop scientifically founded treatment modalities to prevent relapse of sexual abuse. The University Forensic Centre of the University of Antwerp started in 1993 with an outpatient consultation for the diagnosis and treatment of paraphilia disorders...

This article, based mainly on the theories and discoveries of Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957), puts forward the bio-energetic theory of the onset of labour, which assumes it to be one of many examples of bio-energetic pulsation in the organism. It suggests that chronic muscular tension ('armouring') interferes with this spontaneous pulsation and may account for many of the difficulties experienced by women in labour. A form of psychotherapy ('orgone-therapy') based on these theories may prove helpful in childbirth education, in the non-intrusive induction of labour, and in labour itself...

Several new studies have indicated that an active approach to patients with chronic disabling low back pain (LBP) seems effective. Some of these studies emphasize the importance of dealing with the patient's total situation in comprehensive multidisciplinary programs--the bio-psycho-social model. However, these programs are expensive. The aim of this study was to evaluate the rehabilitation outcome from three different active programs in terms of: (1) return-to-work rate, (2) days of sick leave, (3) health-care contacts, (4) pain and disability scores, and (5) staying physically active...

meeting of two days organized has happened at the Chartreuse C.H.S., the 24th and the 25th of March 1983, to give homage to J.-L. Moreno , founder of the groupe dynamic and of the psychodrama, insufficiently honoured in France, it looks. Living exchanges have allowed us to draw the mean lines of his technical innovations based of spontaneousity since "the empty chair", "the doble " and "the upsetting of parts", till the sociometric diagram allowing to locate the interactions in the groupe ...

The concept of alexithymia was first proposed in the 1960's by Sifneos and Nemiah to describe personality traits originally found in psychosomatic patients but which have since been found in other types of patients (alcoholics, drug addicts, traumatic stress disorder patients, sociopaths) as well as in the general population. Etymologically, alexithymia signifies: incapacity to speak one's emotions (from the Greek: a, lack; lexis, word; thymos, sentiments). Alexithymia is not the impossibility of feeling one's emotions, but rather the impossibility of associating them with corresponding mental representations and thus verbalizing them...

The criteria that "illness is biographical crisis od the individual" and that the only medicine is "personal medicine" is stressed. Clinical medicine, which covers medicine in its entirety, demands conceptual and doctrinal reaffirmations so that gradually the patient can come to be dealt with as a human being fron a holistic point of view, which commences with his complaint and consultation, continues with the interview and semiology, to finish with the diagnosis and therapy which, although in some cases it may be surgical, is still medical and integral...