Psychiatric Assessment of Chronic Pain

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Abstract
The subject of pain used to be considered the province of the physiologist, physician, and surgeon. In a prominent medical textbook written over 20 years ago, pain was simply defined as “that sensory experience evoked by stimuli that injure” (Mountcastle, 1968). This explanation of tissue damage that generates nervous impulses along recognised pain pathways is appropriate for acute pains. But if pain persists beyond the normal time of healing, which is normally less than three months but can be as long as six months, the correspondence between extent of injury and pain sensation is much less precise.