Diabetes mellitus is a metabolic disease that occurs due to insufficient synthesis or absorption of insulin, which results in the body's inability to process glucose normally.
Since the middle of the last century, diabetes mellitus has been referred to as a psychosomatic diseasebecause mental factors, such as character traits (personality structure) and acute and chronic stressful events, play an extremely important role in its onset and course.
The reason for this is that the endocrine system in general and the pancreas in particular are very sensitive to nervous system imbalances that arise from a person's tense psychological state. When a person with diabetes is nervous, their blood sugar rises, and when they calm down, it decreases. On vacation, when there is no stress, sugar sometimes goes down to normal, while outbursts of anger, frequent feelings of resentment, guilt, shame, and replaying unpleasant events in the mind activate the disease.
Specific personality traits in future diabetics are formed in childhood, creating a predisposition to the disease. Many authors note that before the disease, such children had "increased conscientiousness, seriousness, lack of childlike carelessness," while they had disrupted contacts with adults, conflicts with relatives, difficulties in social adjustment, anxiety, depression, increased shyness, and decreased self-esteem.
Scientists from the University of Munich have identified the following main causes that contribute to the development of diabetes from the point of view of psychosomatics:
- Post-stress depression. They can develop after some severe shock: the loss of a loved one, parental divorce, interpersonal conflicts. In these cases, the body seems to "freeze" in a state of shock and cannot get out of it, although the situation has already passed.
- Psychological instability, increased anxiety, and a sense of panic. The body in a state of panic attack burns sugar very quickly, and insulin barely has time to be produced. That is why many people want to eat something sweet to cope with nervousness and anxiety. Over time, the need to eat stress becomes constant, and as a result, insulin production is disrupted.
Other researchers (Mendelevich and Solovyova, 2002) identify the following psychosomatic causes of diabetes:
1. Conflicts and various personal needs are satisfied through food. This can lead to gluttony and obesity, followed by prolonged hyperglycemia and further depletion of the pancreatic insulin apparatus.
2. As a result of equating food and love, in the absence of love, there is an emotional experience of hunger and thus, regardless of food intake, a hungry metabolism that corresponds to diabetic metabolism.
3. Diabetes is the result of chronic anxiety related to unconscious childhood fears of being defeated and injured as a result of aggressive rebellious and sexual urges. People with diabetes often have extremely strong tendencies to receive and accept help.
4. Fear, which persists throughout life, mobilizes a constant readiness to fight or flee, with corresponding hyperglycemia without relieving psychophysical stress. Chronic hyperglycemia can easily lead to diabetes mellitus.
That is why psychotherapy should be included in the treatment of diabetes (both type 1 and type 2). Hypnotherapy is especially effective, when a therapist helps a patient recall stressful events that provoked the development of the disease. By bringing a person back to the past in a state of hypnosis, the hypnotherapist disables the mechanisms of pathological communication that cause glucose metabolism disorders.
A good non-drug method of treatment is also transcranial electrical brain stimulation (TES). It is widely used to eliminate pain of various origins due to its analgesic effect, and also has a positive effect on the processes of repair and improvement of the psychophysiological status of a person, reduces anxiety and depression. A promising method of treating inflammation and psychoemotional imbalance associated with allergies is infusion treatment with ketamine.
Guided by the principles of integrative, holistic medicine, combining psychotherapy with ketamine infusions, transcranial electrical stimulation, Neurohelp brain rehabilitation, body-oriented therapy, and art therapy, we can achieve significant improvements in patients' health.
