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New Insights on the Treatment of Emotional Problems

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Psychiatry and Neuroscience Update

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Abstract

Suffering is part of having a valuable life, and emotions and thoughts are, in many cases, the cause of that suffering. The problem does not seem to be suffering itself but the context in which we live, a context that determines that suffering is not normal, leading to a psychological phenomenon called the experiential avoidance. At first, psychotherapies, following the predominant medicine paradigm, tend to search the way to reduce suffering. Today, they are emphasizing the necessity to focus on having values and tend to them, accepting emotions and relating with thoughts in different ways rather than treating them as symptoms to diminish. At the same time, there is strong evidence that shows that chronic exposure to stress has deleterious effects over different structures of the brain, resulting in different psychiatric clinical disorders. At the moment of conceptualizing the problems, clinicians might feel confused by the different approaches to understand emotions and may not know what to do in each case, debating between calming down the situation against letting the emotion do what it is supposed to. Frequently benzodiazepines and other drugs might be misused in this context. The purpose of this article is to review the literature around these facts to achieve a dialectic balance between letting suffer when it is expectable and medicating and/or soothing when it is necessary.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Fundación Foro, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Ángel José Martín Gargiulo & Paula José Quintero

  2. Centro de Epilepsia, Hospital Ramos Mejía, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Ángel José Martín Gargiulo & Nicolás Cristi

  3. School of Medicine, Universidad Austral, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Ángel José Martín Gargiulo

  4. University of Flores, Buenos Aires, Argentina

    Paula José Quintero

  5. Laboratory of Neurosciences and Experimental Psychology, Area of Pharmacology, Department of Pathology, Faculty of Medical Sciences, National University of Cuyo, Mendoza, Argentina

    Augusto Pascual ítalo Gargiulo

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  1. Ángel José Martín Gargiulo
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  2. Paula José Quintero
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  3. Nicolás Cristi
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  4. Augusto Pascual ítalo Gargiulo
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Cathedra of Psychopathology, Catholic University of Argentina, Mendoza, Argentina

    Pascual Ángel Gargiulo

  2. Laboratory of Neurosciences and Experimental Psychology, Area of Pharmacology, Department of Pathology, National University of Cuyo, Council of Scientific and Technological Research (CONICET), Mendoza, Argentina

    Humberto Luis Mesones Arroyo

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Gargiulo, Á.J.M., Quintero, P.J., Cristi, N., Gargiulo, A.P.í. (2019). New Insights on the Treatment of Emotional Problems. In: Gargiulo, P., Mesones Arroyo, H. (eds) Psychiatry and Neuroscience Update . Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95360-1_24

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95360-1_24

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