Navigating Psychological Challenges in Medical Treatment with a Health Psychologist

Health Psychology is a branch of psychology that helps people dealing with complex medical issues. People cope with the psychological stress, anxiety, and depression of dealing with medical issues by relying on family, friends, workplace, and community support. These supports are essential, but sometimes they are not enough. Treatment can short term - like helping someone with a needle or blood phobia, or longer term - helping individuals cope with a chronic health issue.

There are a set of specific areas where it can help to work with a behavioral medicine psychologist. 

Relationships

Chronic medical issues introduce a set of new relationships that can be sources of conflict and distress, including your surgeon, specialist, internist, the phlebotomist, the physical therapist and the scheduler at the doctor's office. Each person comes with their own personalities, strengths, and shortcomings that you have to figure out how to work with. Then there are your family and friends - what they think is helpful may not seem helpful to you. They are dealing with their own issues - some in denial or unsupportive, leading to feelings of isolation, loss of friendships, and being misunderstood. A behavioral medicine psychologist can help you learn how to manage these relational issues in your family and friend network but also effectively navigating yourself through the medical network maze.  

Medical procedure anxiety

Needle phobia, blood draw phobia, and claustrophobia during an MRI or hyperbaric treatment can trigger significant anxiety. There are specific psychological skills, such as graduated exposure practice, progressive muscle relaxation, and slow breathing exercises, that can help you approach and engage in these stressful situations. Psychologists trained in behavioral medicine receive specific training in these coping techniques.

Medical Chronic Stress and anxiety

Four major concerns can generate stress during medical treatment: demandingness, routine disruption, uncertainty, and loss of control. Medical treatment can be demanding - frequent medical visits, driving, parking, waiting, the fatigue afterward, scheduling new visits, dealing with billing and the possible discomfort of the treatment itself.  Next, medical conditions and treatment disrupt our routines, sometimes creating a chaotic "new normal. We like routine. We like doing our own thing. Medical illness and treatment almost always introduce us to uncertainty - about treatment effectiveness, side effects, and disease recurrence. Lastly, one of the toughest things is that we can get stuck in a mode of feeling like we have lost control and don’t have a way out. Even demanding situations, disrupted routines and uncertainty are easier to bear if we can connect to a feeling of being in control.  We tend to feel better when we have a sense of control, even in demanding, disrupted, and uncertain situations.

Getting control

Psychological treatment in behavioral medicine at its heart is about getting control. It is about learning quick coping skills, improving how we navigate through treatment and our relationships, exercising control by establishing routines, managing medical demands, and connecting and collaborating with uncertainty instead of fighting it. Learning and applying these tools takes time, help and practice. That is what we do here - help people navigate through these experiences and instead of getting stuck in helplessness and feeling constantly overwhelmed, we help our clients focus and work on what they do control.  We help our clients get back to living and cultivating a full spectrum life.