Persistent pain is a particularly unpleasant sensory and emotional experience that can have a major impact on health and wellbeing. Multi-disciplinary management of chronic pain includes psychology.  Adjusting to diagnosis, understanding how chronic pain develops and persists, understanding the symptoms and how to reduce them, and recognising the triggers, are all part of psychological management of chronic pain.

Psychological treatment is effective in helping people with chronic pain to improve their health and wellbeing in spite of their diagnosis. Psychology can reduce dependence in medical interventions and increase patients’ ability to self-manage and to improve their quality of life.