Pain psychology

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This article needs more reliable medical references for verification or relies too heavily on primary sources. Please review the contents of the article and add the appropriate references if you can. Unsourced or poorly sourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Pain psychology" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (November 2017)

Pain psychology is the study of psychological and behavioral processes in chronic pain. Pain psychology involves the implementation of treatments for chronic pain. Pain psychology can also be regarded as a branch of medical psychology, as many conditions associated with chronic pain have significant medical outcomes. Untreated pain or ineffective treatment of pain can result in symptoms of anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts, thus it is vital that appropriate pain management occur in a timely fashion following symptom onset.

Mental health-related difficulties can arise as a result of pain, or can pre-exist and worsen during the course of chronic pain, thus causing one to seek out or be referred by the patient’s healthcare provider for pain-relief treatment. Pain psychology aims to treat the person in pain rather than strictly the pain itself. A pain psychologist’s job is to work with the mental health issues that can be feeding into the physical pain that the patient is experiencing, and help them manage and reduce the effect it has on their lives.^{[citation needed]}