Effects of disability - diathesis-stress

I’ve posted before on the effects of disability that make coping a challenge - today I want to cover a few more areas. My aim is not to suggest a ‘poor me’ attitude towards people with chronic pain, but instead to highlight how these demands might affect core beliefs. This is an important [...]

Useful resources: handouts on basic coping skills

Trawling through the interweb can be enlightening sometimes. What’s exciting is to see the range of resources government agencies provide. I’ve just spotted these from the Centre for Clinical Interventions (CCI) from the Department of Health, Australia.
This list of fun activities in pdf includes some social ones as well as solitary ones, [...]

Working with cognitive behavioural therapy - Introducing CBT to a client

For a therapy that has great empirical support and can be used by any and all members of the interdisciplinary team, you can’t really go far from cognitive behavioural therapy. Waaaay back in the olden days when I was originally trained as an occupational therapist, CBT was the province of psychologists only - and [...]

Pain, disability and psychosocial factors

Something that can really get my goat is when people think that because someone has high disability, and they have pain, it must be the pain that ’causes’ the disability - therefore reduce the pain, and you will inevitably reduce the disability.
This can lead to over-treatment of pain with medication (to reduce the pain, often [...]

Some useful questions…

When we’re working with people who have pain, and especially when we’re asking them to do things differently, we’re going to notice ’shifts’ or changes in their presentation that suggest they’re responding to the situation - usually it’s an ‘automatic thought’ that’s jumping in, or perhaps it’s the emotional response to an AT that they’re [...]

Accepting Low Back Pain: Is It Related to a Good Quality of Life?

Victoria L. Mason, Beth Mathias, and Suzanne M. Skevington
This study examines an area of disability ‘adjustment’ that is becoming increasingly important in to therapists and others interested in what helps someone develop readiness to adopt self management rather than an ongoing search for a ‘cure’.
Acceptance refers to ‘a willingness to have pain without [...]

Finding positive solutions

Sometimes you stumble across something that you just can’t put better than it already is… Today’s one of those days, and I’ve found a website that summarises a whole bunch of coping strategies very neatly indeed.
Click this link to go to arthritis.about.com for a great range of pages covering topics like 10 ways to improve [...]

News for people interested in hypnosis and imagery

Hypnosis and the analgesic effect of suggestions has been the subject of much study over the years. Only recently, however, have the specific effects of suggested analgesia vs deeper hypnotic induction been studied, and equally, it’s only been possible recently to study the mechanisms through which this phenomenon occurs.
In the January edition of Pain [...]

Personal growth activities

One resource I can’t do without is new ideas for personal growth activities. I stumbled upon this one recently, and have found the activities a little different from some, and quite thought-provoking.
It’s always helpful to adapt something that is used with people who are ‘well’ rather than using something specifically designed for people with [...]

Relaxation training

For a very brief introduction to relaxation, click through to my Coping Skills section.
Relaxation training is a very popular component of pain management. By itself, relaxation can be an enjoyable experience, but when used as a way to extend activity and help a person maintain control, it becomes a very potent tool. It’s [...]