Overview
The World of Healthcare
In today's hectic world, people often:
- Experience significant stress-related illnesses such as high blood pressure, heart disease, gastrointestinal disorders, headache or chronic fatigue;
- Need help with coping skills at work or at home;
- Have difficulty managing anger, depression and anxiety;
- Qualify as "high utilizers", consuming a disproportionate amount of healthcare resources.
Illness and Distress Can Be Related
- Being ill is often stressful.
- Distress can worsen health.
Training Can Improve Coping and Perhaps Health
- Learning to deal effectively with distressful situations can help individuals cope better with illness.
- To the extent that distress is contributing to the physical problem, health may improve or at least stabilize.
Evidence LifeSkills Training Improves Coping and Health
- In randomized clinical trials, heart patients receiving LifeSkills training enjoyed subsequent better health than those patients in the control group.
- The following slides of a study done by George Bishop. These were patients in Singapore who had coronary bypass surgery. Half were randomly assigned to a control group, the other half to a Williams LifeSkills workshop. You can see their scores were similar before treatment, but different right after treatment and still different - sometimes with additional improvement - at their three-month follow-up.
|
