The Concept of Mental Pain

Abstract

inadequacy. When negative outcomes fall far below one’s standards of the ideal self and aspirations, and outcomes are attributed to the self, that person experiences mental pain. The basic emotion in mental pain is, thus, self-disappointment. Shneidman [5] defined psychache as an acute state of intense psychological pain associated with feelings of guilt, anguish, fear, panic, angst, loneliness and helplessness. The primary source of severe psychache ‘is frustrated psychological needs’ [6] . Psychache is the mental pain of being perturbed [7] . Perturbation refers to one’s inner turmoil, or being upset or mentally disturbed [7] . Bolger [8] defined emotional pain as a state of ‘feeling broken’ that involved the experience of being wounded, loss of self, disconnection, and critical awareness of one’s more negative attributes. Essential characteristics of emotional pain were described as a sense of loss or incompleteness of self and an awareness of one’s own role in the experience of emotional pain [8] . Orbach et al. [9, 10] have defined mental pain as ‘a wide range of subjective experiences characterized as a perception of negative changes in the self and its function that is accompanied by strong negative feelings’. Intense ‘unbearable’ mental (psychological) pain is defined as an emotionally based extremely aversive feeling which can Mental pain is no less real than other types of pain related to parts of the body, but does not seem to get adequate attention. A major problem is the lack of agreement about its distinctive features, conceptualization and operational definition. I will examine some suggested descriptions of mental pain, its association with psychiatric disorders and grief, its assessment and the implications that research in this field may entail.