ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a practical description of the psychological effects of chronic pain, a description that is intended to be technically useful, for clinical applications, treatment development, and research. Naturally, chronic pain can present occasions when patients feel misunderstood or mistreated, feel threatened by poor health, experience interference with normal daily functioning, take medications that can produce side effects, and experience depression and anxiety. When chronic pain leads to painful emotions, memories, and other unwanted experiences, the pain sufferer will naturally attempt to avoid these as well. On the level of human experience, chronic pain brings loss, threats, uncertainty, restraint, apparent mistreatment, and failure into the lives of those who suffer with it. Chronic pain is possibly not best understood as a symptom or condition of the body that results in effects on the person and their functioning. The behavior of the individual pain sufferer, interacting with and in a broader psychological context, is an indivisible whole.
