Sometimes people living with chronic pain drop into a deep dark trance. Pain, especially chronic pain, is an emotional condition as well as a physical sensation. It is a complex experience that affects thought, mood, and behavior and can lead to isolation, immobility, and sometimes drug dependence or addiction.

In those ways, it resembles depression, and the relationship is intimate. Pain is depressing, and depression can cause and even intensify pain. People living with chronic pain have three times the average risk of developing coexisting psychological disorders—usually mood or anxiety disorders—and depressed people have three times the average risk of developing chronic pain.

The combination of depression and pain is reflected in the circuitry of the nervous system. In the experience of pain, communication between body and brain goes both ways. Normally, the brain diverts signals of physical discomfort so that we can concentrate on the external world. When this shutoff mechanism is impaired, physical sensations, including pain, are more likely to become the center of attention.

Brain pathways that handle the reception of pain signals, including the seat of emotions in the limbic region of the brain, use some of the same neurotransmitters involved in the regulation of mood, especially serotonin and norepinephrine. When regulation is impaired or fails, pain is intensified along with sadness, hopelessness, and anxiety. And chronic pain, like chronic depression, can alter the functioning of the nervous system and perpetuate itself.

I believe that for people to move beyond suffering, and even surviving and get to thriving with chronic pain—especially with coexisting depression—needs a multidisciplinary treatment plan.  To learn more about the importance of a multidisciplinary pain management plan please read The Need for Multidisciplinary Chronic Pain Management that you can download for free on our Ariticles page.

You can learn more about the Addiction-Free Pain Management® System at our website www.addiction-free.com. If you are in recovery or believe you may have a medication problem and want to learn how to develop a plan for managing your pain and medication effectively go to our Publications page and check out my book the Addiction-Free Pain Management® Recovery Guide: Managing Pain and Medication in Recovery. To purchase this book please Click Here.

To listen to a recent radio interview I did conducted by Mary Woods for her program One Hour at a Time please Click Here to go to this interview.

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