PCC President Leigh Tobias offers the following newsflash:
Brian Koehler is a professor of Social Work at NYU. He wrote the following, giving permission for it to be shared with psychoanalytic societies: A new research report published in the July issue of the journal Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, I believe, is very important. Inflammation in the body and brain has become, like the effects of the microbiome, active areas of research. Pro-inflammatory cytokines, like Il-6, are upregulated in states of chronic stress (and acute stress) and depression. Chronic stress can increase microglia expression in the brain.
This is another research study demonstrating that individual psychotherapy can have beneficial effects not only on “symptoms,” but on brain, body, etc., including reduction of inflammation. So far, various kinds of individual psychotherapy have been demonstrated to reduce neural atrophy in the hippocampus, reduce hypermetabolic states in various neural regions, repair of single strand DNA breakage, reduce inflammation, etc., in such states as severe OCD, depression, anxiety disorders, borderline personality disorder, schizophrenia, etc.
On a related note, Brian Koehler would highly recommend:
The Patient’s Brain: The Neuroscience Behind the Doctor-Patient Relationship by Fabrizio Benedetti published in 2011 by Oxford University Press.