Serge Marchand • Djéa Saravane
Isabelle Gaumond
Editors

2014

Somatic and Psychiatric Components
of Pain in Mental Health

It is difficult to exaggerate the significance of pain. Every reader of this book will
have suffered pain, at one time or another, mild or severe, unwelcome and inconvenient,
possibly disruptive. Every reader of this book will have heard from other
human beings in pain and witnessed the effects the pain had on their behavior. No
one of reasonable intelligence and sound emotions will have ever sought pain. We
all have tried to avoid it. Ironically enough, however, given the negative experience
associated with pain and its frequently alarming meaning, this ubiquitous phenomenon
is part of normal life.