"Quality Of Life" As A Criterion For Psychological Correction

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

In the vocabulary of a medical (clinical) psychologist or psychosomatics specialist, one can often find such an expression as "improving the quality of life." This term has many interpretations in sociology, politics, medicine, economics, etc. this is often the only possible outcome of psychotherapy. An example is cases when a person becomes ill with a chronic, incurable and even fatal disease. Yes, it certainly makes sense to discuss separately how a psychologist can help a client with an incurable disease, but in this case we will still focus on the concept of "quality of life" as a criterion for improving the state of a psychosomatic client.

When we talk about "the patient's quality of life" (and a psychosomatic client somehow has health problems), we mean not only his psycho-emotional state, but also physical, economic, spiritual, social, etc. After all, if we go from the opposite then it is the deterioration in the quality of life that pushes the client to see a specialist.

Take, for example, a person with an anxiety disorder who experiences various kinds of vegetative crises, panic attacks associated with cardio neurosis, stomach neurosis, asthma, etc. for him), he has problems getting to work and meeting with colleagues or clients, sometimes he cannot even go to the store to buy food for himself. By and large, the active and once joyful life of such a person turns into constant monitoring of his condition and avoiding factors provoking vegetative crises.

So that the most notorious improvement in the quality of life is that after we were able to determine what is amenable to correction, and what needs to be simply understood, accepted and mastered, we helped the client gradually return what would give color to his life. If the symptoms began to appear less frequently and shorter, this is already an improvement in the quality of life. And incrementally, the more functions and capabilities are resumed, the more successful is the work to improve the quality of life. I started going outside - well, I started to ride in public transport - great, I began to communicate with people and visit crowded places without an ambulance - just fine, I went in for sports and got a better job - bingo, etc.

Much changes in a person's life when his disease is incurable. And in this case, we can talk not only about disability, when the loss of any functions leads to limitations, but in general about chronic diseases and diseases associated with our constitutional characteristics. In the latter cases, it is often said that by our way of life, behavior models, psychological attitudes, etc., we can influence the frequency and quality of symptoms. Yes, we cannot cure the organ completely, but we can teach the client to live with this disease so that his life is as close as possible to that of a healthy person. And the more functions we acquire, the higher the quality of the client's life becomes. At the same time, it is important to understand that often anxiety, fears, past traumas and experiences, failures and low self-esteem, and sometimes even the lack of high-quality information about the patient's illness, leads to the fact that he himself is mired in problems and the quality of life not only does not improve, but on the contrary, it drops significantly where there are objectively many resources and helping options for solving the client's problem.

In a sense, we can say that if something gets better in any of the spheres of life, then psychotherapy already has an effect. And the more complex the disease, the less significant the slightest changes in the form of normalization of sleep, increased mood, etc. where psychotherapy can have a healing effect, and where it is simply supportive. And then, precisely with the fact that correction does not lend itself to correction, we learn to live as efficiently as possible. Starting from what physical programs can alleviate the general condition, ending with how to build relationships with other people, when you know that you have certain physiological characteristics and, most importantly, how to find the resources in yourself in order not to slip into a psychological pit and find the most suitable for your a place for abilities in the system of the universe. In this case, the fewer obstacles a person has to interact with society due to an illness, and the fewer questions and claims arise to oneself, the higher the level of quality of life, including psycho-emotional state, healthy rest, sleep, etc.