ABSTRACT
The Coronavirus-19 (COVID-19) disease pandemic has a huge impact on global health and hospitals, which have had to reorganize their services to deal with an unprecedented health emergency. This paper describes the experience of the Clinical Psychology Unit of a large healthcare organization in Milan (Italy), focusing on the interventions delivered for hospitalized COVID-19 patients with the aim of highlighting their experiences and related psychological needs, and propose reflections on the functions that the psychologist can have with respect to these needs. The reflections are based on an extensive clinical experience conducted in presence for over a year with those patients hospitalized for COVID-19 who have received treatment with C-PAP, helmet, or low-flow oxygen. This led to the bottom-up identification of three macro-areas of issues that these patients face: isolation, fear of death, grief. In addition, two further transversal themes have been identified - guilt and the perception of time - which seem to modulate the articulation of the three macro-areas. Starting from these experiences and needs, two lines of actions of the psychologist with the hospitalized COVID- 19 patient are identified that correspond to the two phases of hospitalization: 1) an action in the `here and now' when the patient is still in a critical phase;2) an action of narrative recovery of the lived experience when the patient is recovering. The importance for hospitalized COVID-19 patients of delivering psychological consultations in presence is supported by clinical experience;however, its effectiveness in preventing subsequent maladjustments should be evaluated in further studies.
ABSTRACT
With Western therapeutic techniques prevailing in Chinese therapies, some techniques that include Chinese traditional cultural features are required since some cultural factors are not considered in the Western method. Our study introduced a new technique, the moving to emptiness technique (MET), which combines Western structural progress and core factors of Chinese culture. Seventeen therapists treated 107 clients with the MET. Clients reported their target symptoms initially, and therapists helped them transfer invisible symptoms to perceivable stuff and remove their jarring stuff using the psychological emptiness area. At the end of the consultations, we found that MET could eliminate symptoms immediately. By grouping target symptoms according to their frequency, the results showed that clients in the high-frequency symptom group had higher rehabilitation rates than those in the low-frequency symptom group. Additionally, the results of the bereavement group were better than those of the non-bereavement group, indicating that the MET can significantly alleviate clients' target symptoms. In future studies, the replication and stability of the MET can be assessed by integrating questionnaires, experimental designs, and neurological equipment.
Subject(s)
COVID-19 , Humans , Pandemics , Surveys and QuestionnairesABSTRACT
The COVID-19 era represented an important stressful event affecting population in many different ways, with important negative impact on social, working and relational life. Indeed, the home-isolation in addition to the high-level of distress given by fear of infection, has significantly resulted in a large number of psychological-consequences. Moreover, in order to guarantee a continuity of care, different measures have been applied among hospitals such as the implementation of teledermatology services. For these reasons, we implemented at our Dermatological-Clinic psychological video-consultations through our teledermatology-services. Herein we report our experience of 23 psychological-video-consultations, which led to achieve a significant reduction of DLQI (from 4.4 ± 3.9 at baseline to 1.6 ± 2.5 at week-4) in patients suffering from chronic skin conditions during the COVID-19 era.