THE KEY ROLE OF CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGY IN MEDICAL CONDITIONS: ADVANCES AND PERSPECTIVES

Abstract The symposium aims at emphasizing the key role of clinical psychology and its concepts for the assessment and treatment of patients with different medical diseases. The contributions to this panel show how an adequate psychological assessment may concur to a higher better understanding of psychological experience in medical conditions, leading to better comprehension of the body-mind processes. It is known that, on the one hand, life expectancy is increasing world-wide and age-related disorders are becoming a major health concern. In fact, chronic diseases may seriously impact on perceived quality of life, leading to individual’s psychological suffering. Moreover, psychological factors may also drive individual behavior, deeply conditioning the management of chronic condition. On the other hand, it is true that even young adults are involved in severe illness which are extremely related to morbidity and mortality. This is all the more so true when we approach to complex and heterogeneous medical diseases analyzing suffering and treatment and highlighting advances and perspectives. Four contributions exploring how the most relevant psychopathological factors impact on individual health related experience, including adherence, compliance and treatment strategy, will be presented. A first contribution to the conference (Martino G., et al.) aims to explore how psychological factors and metabolic control may affect health related quality of life, with a prospective speculation to prevention strategies. A second contribution (Marchini F., et al.) investigates the association between empathic identification and quality of care in diabetes. A third contribution (Martino M.L., et al.) aims to examine the traumatic individual experience of breast cancer from pre-hospitalization to follow up. The fourth contribution (Donisi V., et al.) aims to analyze the association between psychological factors and chronic migraine severity, disability and type of drug consumption.