Dor crônica ou um corpo deprimido? : reflexões sobre as dimensões psicológicas da dor corporal na contemporaneidade

Abstract

Chronicle pain is an important contemporary public health problem, as well as the increasing demand for health care services and technological resources to improve the approach of several factors involved in the consequential incapacity and suffering. In the last years, the study of pain and depression has contributed to deep changes in the comprehension of the nervous system dynamics and complexity; it has raised the recognition of the importance of social, cultural and psychological factors for the experience and expression of pain, and, besides that, it has diversified therapeutic care resources. This exciting reality has raised the interest to deepen the knowledge in this area and, therefore, the research had as main objective to investigate chronicle pain and its relation to depressive symptoms in the contemporary context. For fieldwork, we have elected five patients with chronicle pain and depression diagnosis, who were sent by the medical team of a Pain Clinic in João Pessoa city, Paraíba state. They were monitored through a therapeutic listening weekly, with fifty minutes for each session, for up to ten months. Collected data were analyzed and interpreted from a psychoanalytical perspective, considering the body somatic language in chronicle pain and in depression, trying to understand psychological factors in the context of these people s life stories. Among several results, it is possible to highlight feelings of abandonment and the need for care, the involvement of the body in the process of psychological elaboration, the need for recognition through the experience of pain, marked losses, interferences in family dynamics and secondary benefits of painful symptoms. The depressive trace and the paralyzing character of pain were present in all participants, identified through aspects such as social isolation, unproductiveness, and feelings of emptiness, death drive, low self-esteem, hopelessness and acceptance of the sick person role as characteristic of self-identification. In this way, we expect to contribute to deepen this thematic and we can conclude that, despite the chronicle pain/depressive body controversial relation, pain has always been associated to/with depression