Thammasat University students who are interested in allied health sciences, psychology, art, psychotherapy, dance, and poetry may find a newly available book useful.
Encountering Pain: Hearing, seeing, speaking is edited by Deborah Padfield and Joanna M. Zakrzewska.
It is an Open Access book, available for free download at this link.
Pain is a signal in the nervous system that something may be wrong. It is an unpleasant feeling that may be sharp or dull. It may be transitory or constant. The International Association for the Study of Pain defines pain as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with, or resembling that associated with, actual or potential tissue damage.” In medical diagnosis, pain is regarded as a symptom of an underlying condition.
The TU Library collection includes several books about different aspects of pain and its diagnosis.
Deborah Padfield, Ph.D. is a visual artist and Senior Lecturer in Arts and Health Humanities at St George’s, University of London, the United Kingdom (UK). Joanna M. Zakrzewska, M.D., D.D.S. is a Consultant and Honorary Professor in facial pain at UCL Hospitals National Health Service (NHS) Foundation Trust, London, UK.
Their book explores how we communicate persistent pain in words, visual images, and gestures. In addition, how we respond to the pain of other people is examined, to see if this can be done with more empathy and effectiveness.
Defined as having lasted over three months, persistent pain changes the brain and nervous system, so pain no longer warns us of potential danger. Instead, it appears to be a fault in the body’s system. Perhaps explaining how pain works can help us cope with it.
Persistent pain is a major cause of disability around the world, but remains difficult to describe. This causes problems for patients suffering from pain and others who are trying to help.
Encountering Pain evaluates research on the potential value of visual images and non-verbal forms of communication to improve doctor–patient understanding.
After obvious causes have been eliminated, chronic pain is generally diagnosed through language, yet it is difficult to discuss in words. Some researchers argue that pain cannot be described with language. Others believe it can generate language, with pain as an area where feeling and language overlap. Commonly used verbal or numerical rating scales do not really sum up pain. When doctors ask patients to rate the pain they are feeling on a scale from one to ten, this does not give a full picture of the experience. Instead, patients who are in pain try to express it through bodily movements, emotional reactions and artistic expressions in addition to words.
Here are some thoughts about pain by writers, most of whom are represented in the TU Library collection:
There is a saying in Tibetan, ‘Tragedy should be utilized as a source of strength.’
No matter what sort of difficulties, how painful experience is, if we lose our hope, that’s our real disaster.
- Dalai Lama XIV
To have pain is to have certainty; to hear about pain is to have doubt.
- Elaine Scarry in The Body in Pain (1985)
PAIN, n. An uncomfortable frame of mind that may have a physical basis in something that is being done to the body, or may be purely mental, caused by the good fortune of another.
- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)
Pain is always new to the sufferer, but loses its originality for those around him.
- Alphonse Daudet, Pain (1887)
We cannot soothe the pain we do not know.
- Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Corinne at the Cape of Misena, The Amulet, 1832.
For I consider that the sufferings of the present time do not amount to anything in comparison with the glory that is going to be revealed in us. For the creation is waiting with eager expectation for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not by its own will, but through the one who subjected it, on the basis of hope that the creation itself will also be set free from enslavement to corruption and have the glorious freedom of the children of God. For we know that all creation keeps on groaning together and being in pain together until now.
- Paul of Tarsus, Romans 8:18-22
World’s use is cold, world’s love is vain,
World’s cruelty is bitter bane;
But pain is not the fruit of pain.
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning, A Vision of Poets
One fire burns out another’s burning,
One pain is lessen’d by another’s anguish.
- William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (1597), Act I, scene 2
The scourge of life, and death’s extreme disgrace,
The smoke of hell,—that monster callèd Paine.
- Sir Philip Sidney, Sidera, Paine.
There’s a pang in all rejoicing,
And a joy in the heart of pain;
And the wind that saddens, the sea that gladdens,
Are singing the selfsame strain.
- Bayard Taylor, Wind and the Sea.
Nothing begins, and nothing ends,
That is not paid with moan;
For we are born in others’ pain,
And perish in our own.
- Francis Thompson, Daisy
A man of pleasure is a man of pains…When pain can’t bless, heaven quits us in despair.
- Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742-1745)
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.
- James Baldwin
I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
- James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
- C.S. Lewis
Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.”
- C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?
- John Keats, Letters
The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd – The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.
- Fernando Pessoa
If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)