Illnesses Tied Intimately to the Emotions

Emotional and environmental factors can cause many illnesses, including high blood pressure, rheumatoid arthritis and heart attacks, a psychiatrist says.

“Where there’s a lot of gradual, mounting tension, most of which the person is not even aware of, the result is some physical illness,” said the psychiatrist, Dr. Barney Dlin.

“We’re not sure of the mechanism, but we know emotions are intimately tied with major adaptive systems of the body,” he said recently at the annual meeting of the Academy of Psychosomatic Medicine.

Dlin, a former president of the Academy of Psychosomatic Medicine, said the term psychosomatic was coined to describe the relationship between the mind and body and how health can be affected.

Dlin, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Temple University, said many doctors do not give enough consideration to a person’s emotional state.

“It’s much easier for doctors to simply treat a person without concern for their feelings or environmental influences,” he said. “By the same token, it is easier to treat emotional problems without involvement on what’s going on in the body.”