Biopsychosocial

Healing the mind is about more than just taking medicine

This paper examines the benefit or lack of it of antidepressants. Are they more effective than placebos, though bearing in mind that placebos can be effective.

Six Categories of Illnesses

This paper presents a way of categorising all illnesses and understanding their physical, psychological and social components.
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Categories: Biopsychosocial

Psychosomatic aspects of illness. Patient Management 8:21-28

All illnesses have somatic and psychosocial components. The personality and circumstances patients needs to be taken into account.

A checklist of 6 categories of illnesses is a pragmatic way of making sure that all types of symptoms and illnesses are covered. The categories are classical physical illnesses; classical psychiatric illnesses; psychophysiological symptoms; reliving of traumas; hysterical illnesses (symbolic of other events); symptoms taken on as identification with a deceased loved person; secondary to any of the above.
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Publication Author: Paul Valent Publication Date: 1979 Categories: Biopsychosocial

Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry: A Personal View

These are retrospective reflections on 25 years of liaison psychiatry. Issues of stress and trauma, violence, biopsychosocial views of medicine and psychotherapy, and the place of right brain functioning in emergency departments and consulting rooms is examined.
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Publication Author: Paul Valent Publication Date: 2011 Categories: Biopsychosocial, Philosophical pieces

Attachment: Back to Basics

This paper presents the essential features of the survival strategy Attachment: its biological, psychological and social features, adaptive and maladaptive manifestations, and treatment for it s dysfunctions.

Attachment and adaptation symptoms and illnesses. Talk to Grief Volunteers

Overactivity of the survival strategies attachment and adaptation (goal surrender) lead to psychophysiological, psychosomatic, and somatic symptoms and illnesses. Examples are provided.
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Publication Author: Paul Valent Publication Date: 2000 Categories: Adaptation, Accept & Grieve, Attachment, Protected & Provided, Biopsychosocial, Survival Strategies

Attachment and its Ripples, 3d National Conference on Mental Health Aspects of Persons Affected by Family Separation 2006

This paper looks thoroughly at many aspects of Attachment from animal evolution to the depths of the human soul. It examines biological, psychological and social aspects of Attachment, and its pains and fulfilments.

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Publication Author: Paul Valent Categories: Attachment, Protected & Provided, Biopsychosocial, Dying, bereavement, Survival Strategies

Disaster syndrome in Encyclopedia of Stress. Ed. George Fink. New York: Academic Press

Disaster syndrome is the forgotten opposite of fight and flight. It has been known as psychic shock, General Adaptation Syndrome, and Conservation-Withdrawal syndrome. It underlies the survival strategy adaptation or goal surrender. The syndrome is examined in all its aspects and ramifications.
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Publication Author: Paul Valent Publication Date: 2000 Categories: Adaptation, Accept & Grieve, Biopsychosocial, Disasters, Survival Strategies

Issues with dying patients. Med J Aust 1:433-437

Doctors may deny that their patients are dying and attempt omnipotent means to keep them alive. Fear of death in both patients and doctors resonates with earlier fears of helplessness and abandonment. Once these are clarified patients may approach the ends of their lives with a sense of meaning and purpose, like a ripe fruit about to fall. Dying children can also achieve meaningful deaths if allowed to, and if they are supported.
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Publication Author: Paul Valent Publication Date: 1978 Categories: Biopsychosocial, Dying, bereavement

Antimedical feeling. Med J Aust 2:131-132

Though critical attitudes to medicine are common, they are frequently unjustified by facts.Some emotional undercurrents leading to such criticisms are examined.
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Publication Author: Paul Valent Publication Date: 1979 Categories: Biopsychosocial, Philosophical pieces

The human costs to staff from closure of a general hospital: an example of the effects of the threat of unemployment and fragmentation of a valued work structure. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry. 35:150-154

The closure of a major public hospital had significant effects on the medical and other staff. Special stressors were the perceived meaninglessness of the project alongside erosion of medical values. Demoralisation and physical and psychosocial symptoms were surprisingly numerous and significant.
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Publication Author: Paul Valent Publication Date: 2001 Categories: Assertiveness, Combat & Work, Biopsychosocial, Compassion fatigue, Disasters