Why is psychic pain treated as a symptom instead of pain?
There is a conceptual inconsistency in contemporary medicine that I have become increasingly unable to reconcile. Psychiatry recognizes psychic pain as a genuine clinical phenomenon, and suicidology has long recognized unbearable psychological pain as integral to suicidal states. Neuroscience has simultaneously demonstrated that nociception, affective pain, reward, motivation, salience, stress responsivity, and emotional regulation are interconnected biological processes.
Yet when psychic pain becomes intolerable, psychiatry has remarkably little therapeutic infrastructure directed …
Why is psychic pain treated as a symptom instead of pain?
