I’ve been writing about psychosocial factors and pain but I realise that I haven’t actually defined what I mean by psychosocial factors. The strange thing about this term is that it’s often conflated with “psychological” or “psychopathological” when it’s actually not. So… where to begin?
The Collins English Dictionary defines psychosocial as: “of or relating to processes or factors that are both social and psychological in origin”, while the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “Of or relating to the interrelation of social factors and individual thought and behaviour.” According to the Oxford, it first appeared in the American Journal of Psychology in 1890 when it was used to describe the factors associated with the increase of alcoholism. An 1899 journal used it to describe “… psycho-social phenomena, such as language, customs, rights, religion etc., arising from the action of social elements with or upon the individual mind.”
So, the term is fairly recent but seems to have always been associated with broader influences on thoughts and behaviour – that is, a reciprocal response between what individuals think and do, and what helps to shape (and also responds to) what happens in the community.
When we think about pain, the most common “psychosocial” factors seem to be psychological – things like attention (vigilance), catastrophising (thinking the worst), negative affect (low mood), treatment seeking (behaviours associated with looking for help), avoidance (not doing, not approaching). What is lacking in clinical practice, in my humble opinion, is the relationship between how these factors develop and are maintained, and how those around an individual (both family and the wider community) respond to these factors. It’s not that there is no research into these relationships – it’s that research is complex, it’s tough to conduct experiments in this field, and effecting change once relationships are identified is pretty hard. More than that, health professionals typically see individuals, not people-in-context.
BUT here are some of the areas currently being explored.
Clinician behaviour – there would be few readers of this blog who are unfamiliar with Ben Darlow’s work on the power of what clinicians say (Darlow, Dowell, Baxter, Mathieson, Perry & Dean, 2013), though he’s not the first research to begin to look at this – Tamar Pincus and others have also reviewed the influence of practitioners beliefs on what they do for people with persistent pain (Parsons, Harding, Breen, Foster, Pincus, Vogel & Underwood, 2007). The broad conclusions from this body of work, of which these two are tiny tips of a very large iceberg, is that what clinicians believe about pain and chronicity and hurt/harm influences both their treatment recommendations and their attitude towards people experiencing persistent pain, and has a direct effect on chronicity in the acute stages of a pain problem.
Family responses – Herta Flor and colleagues explored the impact of persistent pain on family relationships way back in the 1980’s, while much more recently, Burns, Post, Smith, Porter et al (in press) investigated the interaction between spouse criticism and the effect on pain intensity and behaviour in people with persistent low back pain. Chan, Connelly & Wallace (2017) established that poor peer relationships influenced both emotional functioning and persistent pain amongst adolescents, while treatment seeking amongst adolescents was found to be associated with elevated treatment seeking in their parents (Stone & Wilson, 2016). Whether the relationships are genetic (in family patterns of persistent pain and disability), or learned (social learning theory) or a mix of both – it looks like how others respond and behave in relation to pain and disability has a strong influence on persistent pain in an individual.
Work – This, naturally, has been the place of many a study trying to establish a relationship between biomechanical factors and the onset and maintenance of pain, but it has also been the location for studies examining social relationships like supervisory responses, peer relationships, employer flexibility along with the personal effects of workplace stress on the body. I’m not going to review the myriad studies, but point you to a good systematic review of prognostic factors for return to work by Steenstra, Munhall, Irvin, Oranye, Passmore et al (2016) to demonstrate just how many factors have already been identified.
I’ve barely touched the surface of the social aspects influencing our experience of pain and disability. It’s evident that these factors have been identified – but let me ask you this: How often do you identify and then provide an intervention for these social factors? And if not, why not? And if not you – who?
HealthSkills Blog 
Bronnie, your concluding sentence reminded me of the famous saying of the sage Hillel the Elder.
That last comment we the subject of my Otago Poly discussion tonight on personal causation in people returning to work out looking for work. It’s the most indicative factor of poor outcomes when it is weak and yet, what are we doing about it?
Are you saying yes we are looking at psychological constructs but we are viewing them in a social context? It seems the actual psychological construct exists so for instance if a person was found to be depressed we look at the depression but also we look at how if is affected by the social surrounding of the patient concerned or we just look at it in the social context because it seems we need to look at both the psychological and the social and also how they interact. What are your thoughts?
No, I think few people are looking at the social aspects of the BPS framework, and instead conflate psychosocial to mean psychopathology. I would hope people would think about how and why the context/social environment of the person is shaping the person’s pain – which could include a family not “getting it” that the person needs more help from time to time, or the workplace which doesn’t allow for effective paced work, or the legislation that allows only some pain problem to be “allowed” but doesn’t allow for others (eg in NZ under ACC legislation). There’s also the tendency to pathologise all pain and at times this isn’t helpful at all – maybe having the occasional headache and backache is part of life and a signal to take some time out, maybe it doesn’t all need a diagnosis and pain abolition, maybe it’s OK to feel grim and unhappy and not have this called “depression” (especially if it doesn’t respond to antidepressant medications). I suspect there are a lot of “normal” responses to stressful situations that get defined as “needing treatment” when perhaps taking a bit of time out and looking after yourself is what’s needed (which would likely happen in the short term in a hunter-gatherer society).