- All in the Mind
"The company thinks it's all in my mind" he said apologetically, sitting stiffly upright on the edge of the chair. He had back pain, apparently related to an incident at work when he fell into a deep pit that wasn't supposed to be under the area where he was working. He had extreme tension in his chest muscles, so much that he often seemed to gasp for air. He was also impotent. I tried to imagine what body part his boss would want fixed if he experienced impotence. I didn't think it would be his head.
It always annoys me a bit, that phrase "it's all in the mind", because it is such a completely meaningless expression. It is usually intended to indicate that some problem or other does not come from within the body, but it has the additional implication that such problems are not real. Try telling that to someone who has stress-related hypertension(high blood pressure) sterility or CHD. You can't get much more body-involved than these problems. People who use the expression "it's all in the mind" have a falsely simplistic notion of the way that human beings are.
Consider the case of cancer. Some researchers claim that for many cancer patients there is a common unhappy emotional history. Such emotional difficulties can lead, through a stress reaction (increases in cortisol in the blood) to a reduced effectiveness of the immune response. Thus, the theory goes, the pathway to cancer may begin years, even decades before an identifiable physical problem. Other people may develop cancer largely as a result of exposure to some environmental carcinogen. This means there are identifiable organic effects of the exposure. But there are also identifiable emotional effects of the cancer itself that may be as savagely disruptive of the individual's quality of life as the organic illness. This means the cancer will produce emotional distress, and stress, which in turn may allow the cancer to invade faster.
This pattern of interaction between psychological and physiological events characterises all experience, though sometimes it is more obvious than others. The effects are not always negative. Some years ago Neil Miller, an American Psychologist showed that when people were given feedback about certain basic bodily processes, such as blood pressure, they could learn to control these processes. These processes are supposedly automatic events that can't be directly controlled. But Miller's technique, called Biofeedback, has allowed such control. Not just with blood pressure, but with actual health problems. One Australian study used biofeedback to train Asthmatics to voluntarily accelerate heart rate. Over time this caused the patients' breathing passages to expand in a controlled way, which in turn reduced asthmatic attacks and the use of medication.
Recently an even simpler psychological strategy has been examined by researchers for its possible use in the voluntary control of automatic bodily processes - the use of mental images. For some people, all they have to do to change some basic regulatory processes like heart rate or blood pressure is to change their thoughts. Of course, this is the theory behind the "Visualization" procedures used by the Simontons in the U.S.A. to help their patients fight against cancer. People were asked to imagine their bodies fighting the cancer, apparently with some success.
Another situation I observed, demonstrating the mind-body interaction, concerned a young woman whose head was crushed by a machine in her work place. She developed a fear of such machines that prevented her from doing her job. If she stayed in the situation long enough she began to tremble, her blood pressure would shoot up, she would feel an overwhelming nausea, and finally she would faint. Even thinking about this work situation was enough to produce some of the same symptoms. To get rid of such powerful conditioned fears it is not enough simply to achieve insight into the problem. People must be taught to change the responses of their bodies when faced by the fearful situation. Insight might be a start, but it is the body's response that must be changed. That is what we worked on and it got her back to work.
Many different words are used to describe human emotions. Words like anger, happiness, joy, sadness, elation, excitement, misery, passion, and ecstasy. Underlying every emotional experience is a change in the body, and that change is remarkably similar whatever the emotion. Furthermore, without that change there is no recognition of the emotion at all. When body arousal is manipulated artificially, with caffeine for example, people will often feel the emotions shown by others around them. They will be happy if the others are happy, or angry if the others are angry. Thus bodily change is an essential requirement for the production of an emotional experience, but the interpretation of that experience, the mental state, may come after.
People sometimes imagine that the link between body and mind can be clearly shown only with emotional states like those I listed above. I believe they are wrong. Doing mental arithmetic, choosing synonyms, selecting colours for a drawing, translating words into another language, answering general knowledge questions, watching the news, playing video games, all produce measurable changes in physiological arousal, sometimes to a quite startling degree. It is almost impossible to find some aspect of experience that does not involve a fluctuation in physiological arousal. While it is true that we can often use our minds over a period of time to get our bodies back into balance, the fact is that if we experience chronic stress the suffering is intimately bound up with the imbalance in our bodies. So if you hear someone say "it's all in the mind", point out to them the error of their ways.
More readings will be added to my blog from time to time. Have a quick look now to see the first posting on my blog PSYC1PLUS