New insights on the treatment of emotional problems
pp. 299-310
in: Humberto Mesones Arroyo (ed), Psychiatry and neuroscience update, Berlin, Springer, 2019Abstract
Suffering is part of having a valuable life, and emotions and thoughts are, in many cases, the cause of that suffering. The problem does not seem to be suffering itself but the context in which we live, a context that determines that suffering is not normal, leading to a psychological phenomenon called the experiential avoidance. At first, psychotherapies, following the predominant medicine paradigm, tend to search the way to reduce suffering. Today, they are emphasizing the necessity to focus on having values and tend to them, accepting emotions and relating with thoughts in different ways rather than treating them as symptoms to diminish. At the same time, there is strong evidence that shows that chronic exposure to stress has deleterious effects over different structures of the brain, resulting in different psychiatric clinical disorders. At the moment of conceptualizing the problems, clinicians might feel confused by the different approaches to understand emotions and may not know what to do in each case, debating between calming down the situation against letting the emotion do what it is supposed to. Frequently benzodiazepines and other drugs might be misused in this context. The purpose of this article is to review the literature around these facts to achieve a dialectic balance between letting suffer when it is expectable and medicating and/or soothing when it is necessary.