Psychological and psychopathological aspects related to endometriosis

16 Set , 2022

Author: MD Uarda Ismaili

Institution: Maternity Koco Gliozheni Obstetric & Gynecology

Endometriosis is an inflammatory disease that affects women and can have negative implications on identity, mood and relational life.

Endometriosis is associated with chronic pain, and it is generally accepted that psychology influences how we perceive pain, in that psychological factors, not just physical ones, can influence the amount of pain we feel.

Therefore, although endometriosis is one of the benign pathologies, it has a progressive character and is responsible for a symptomatology which in many cases is painful and debilitating.

Endometriosis can have an effect on fertility. Infertility has psychological effects in terms of anxiety and stress, depression and self-esteem. Many women with endometriosis must cope with infertility as well as the disease itself.

Because endometriosis can cause pain on intercourse, women with the disease may have to cope with lack of sex or sexual pleasure. This may have significant effects on women’s feelings of sexuality and femininity.

So, as well as all of the aspects of psychology which are involved in any illness, endometriosis presents a unique set of possible psychological issues to be taken into account in our understanding of the disease.

Women suffering from endometriosis appear to be more introverted and anxious than those who suffer from other gynecological diseases. To play a decisive role in this sense, is the phenomenon of chronic and cyclical pain affecting symptomatic patients: recent research shows that for example the prevalence of depression is greater in women suffering from endometriosis with chronic pelvic pain, compared to women who suffer of this pathology, they do not present any painful symptoms

We should think about human beings as complex systems, and that health and illness should not be viewed as having a single causal factor (Ogden, 2000).

Individuals are viewed as participants in illness. Therefore, the whole person should be treated, not just the physical.

Health and illness exist on a continuum.

In light of what emerged from researches it is clear the importance of a psychological support work, immediately, after the diagnosis and in the long term, that can take charge of the acceptance of the disease, of the pain, of the drug therapy, of the relational and personal management of symptoms in order to make a process of acceptance and functional revision of life after illness possible.