Public Health & Health Science Division, ULAB

Our paper discusses findings on the correlation between pain perception and psychiatric disorders. The psychiatric disorders we chose to study are Bipolar Disorder, Schizophrenia, Anxiety, Major Depression, and Parkinson’s Disease. We performed a literature review on 30 articles, with at least 6 studies per illness. We hypothesized that pain perception is altered by psychiatric disorders. Whether pain perception was increased or decreased depended on the type of mental illness. We reviewed research articles that induced pain in healthy controls and patients and recorded the difference in pain tolerance and threshold. The pain stimulus varied from electrical, emotional (photo), thermal, and ischemic. Our findings showed that for schizophrenia and bipolar depression there is a very strong case for a decreased pain sensitivity on account of the disorder. Depression had more of a nuanced result as thermal pain decreased pain sensitivity, ischemic pain increased pain sensitivity, and electrical stimulation was inconclusive. Parkinson’s Disease showed a generalized increase in pain sensitivity on account of the disorder itself, but the correlation was not very concrete. Finally, anxiety did not have any significant differences in general but PTSD specifically had an increase in pain sensitivity. As a result of our research, we found that our hypothesis was correct: pain perception was altered across all psychiatric disorders surveyed. Bipolar Disorder, Major Depression, and Schizophrenia resulted in general decreases in pain perception while Anxiety and Parkinson’s disease showed increases in pain perception.