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Last updated: Wed, Aug 14, 2024
Another old idea is that of the pain-prone personality. (With a name like that, thrice alliterative, there's got to be something to it!) Much of this refers back to an article published in 1959 in the American Journal of Medicine, “Psychogenic Pain and the Pain Prone Patient.” The theory was updated in 1982 by D. Blumer and M. Heilbronn, who wrote a paper, “Chronic pain as a variant of depressive disease: the pain-prone disorder,” which was published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. According to the authors, the disorder is marked by:
As we've seen, some of these characteristics are common among pain patients.
One problem with a theory like this is its provability. A second problem with such theories is that they haven't been proven. The search for a 'pain-prone personality' and for 'psychogenic pain' has proven to be futile,
1 wrote the editors of the 2011 “Handbook of Pain Assessment.” Yet those very ideas are discussed in their own book, in a chapter on psychiatric disorders and in another chapter about disability determination.
The idea that the pain patient is very much involved as a causative or at least a modulating factor in his own illness is deeply embedded in current thinking about pain. Some aspects of it are discussed in Somatization, Psychogenic Pain, and So Forth and in its sub-sections. The major section The Psychology of Pain provides background information about this topic.