ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests treatment approaches for both physician and psychotherapist. Treatment of environmental illness (EI) patients, as for other patients with somatization and psychogenic illness, requires a complementary relationship between medical and mental healthcare professionals. In reaction to the patient's transference and resistant behavior, the doctor may displace feelings toward the patient. Hateful patients are those with whom the physician or psychotherapist has an occasional personality clash. Clinical experience suggests that psychiatric patients who have dissociative identity disorder co-morbid with borderline-narcissistic personality structure have great hostility and the most fantastic accounts of victimization. In treating patients who have adopted the sick role, Brody introduced the concept of "the healing context" and explained it from a socio-cultural perspective. Pharmacotherapy with EI patients may be indicated if clear differential diagnoses are established for which medications are the preferred treatment.
