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Paul Grobstein's picture

Pain: physical or mental?

MY "proposed model" ... "appears to dissociate mental and physical health"? Ouch. NOT intended. My argument was that the "medical model" is effective in certain contexts, but less so in others, not that there is or should be a sharp line drawn between "mental" and "physical." Its a point of equal significance both for doctors and for mental health workers.

Yes, pain is an excellent example. Pain is always "in the head," ie "mental" in the sense of reflecting patterns of activity in the brain. But it is of course also "physical" in exactly that same sense. In some cases, there is an origin in the body outside the brain that a doctor (or someone else) can find; in other cases there isn't, the origin of the pattern of activity is entirely in the brain. It is that difference that I suspect corresponds roughly to what people usually mean by distingushing between "physical" and "mental."

The point here is that "mental" states (as that term in usually used) have physical embodiments and that "physical" states (as that term is usually used) often have "mental" aspects. The point is not to assign things to one or the other category but rather to find ways to make better sense both of the distinction and of the interaction between the two (as, for example, by redefining them as above).

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