Table 1.
Definitions of pain-related suffering found in the literature.
| Author (Year) | Discipline | Definition |
|---|---|---|
| Adunsky (2008) | Palliative medicine | […] suffering is traditionally viewed as a state encompassing psychological distress, spiritual concerns, and various aspects of physical pain.1 |
| Aguilera (2021) | Bioethics | If S is a globally broadcast overall state of significant net negative valence, then S is a state of suffering.2 |
| Andaya (2011) | Medical ethics | […] suffering [is] defined as long-term or chronic distress.3 |
| Bellieni (2005) | Medical ethics | […] suffering is to be understood as frustration of the tendency towards fulfilment of the various aspects of our being.5 |
| Bernier (2019) | Nursing studies | […] suffering [is] defined here as the individual appraisal of a distressing experience.7 |
| Best (2015) | Psycho-oncology | […] suffering is defined as an all-encompassing, dynamic, individual phenomenon characterized by the experience of alienation, helplessness, hopelessness, and meaninglessness in the sufferer that is difficult for them to articulate. It is multidimensional […].8,9 |
| Best (2015) | Psycho-oncology | See Best (2015) |
| Boisaubin (1989) | Anaesthesiology | Suffering is experienced by individuals and arises from threats to the integrity of the individual as a complex social and psychological entity.12 |
| Broggi (2008) | Neurosurgery | […] suffering [is] pain's closely related experiential counterpart.13 |
| Brugnoli (2016) | Palliative medicine | [The different forms of suffering] are called the “total pain” […] that encompasses all of a person's physical, psychological, social, and spiritual [sic].15 |
| Bueno-Gomez (2017) | Medical ethics | Suffering is an unpleasant or even anguishing experience which can severely affect a person on a psychophysical and even existential level.17 |
| Bustan (2015) | Psychophysics | […] suffering [involves] long-term implications of pain associated with threat, loss, potential damage, and impending harm for the self [and is] the combined display of several distinctive negative emotions.18 |
| Cassell (1982) | Medical ethics | […] suffering can be defined as the state of severe distress associated with events that threaten the intactness of the person.20 |
| Chapman (1999) | Anaesthesiology | Suffering is the perception of serious threat or damage to the self, and it emerges when a discrepancy develops between what one expected of one's self and what one does or is.21 |
| Charmaz (1983) | Sociology | […] suffering is the loss of self in chronically ill persons who observe their former self-images crumbling away without the simultaneous development of equally valued new ones.22 |
| Coulehan (2009) | Medical ethics | Suffering is the experience of distress or disharmony caused by the loss, or threatened loss, of what we most cherish.24 |
| de Medeiros (2009) | Gerontology | Suffering […] includes an individual's awareness of a threat to self through death, loss of identity, or uncertainty of the meaningfulness of one's life.28 |
| De Ridder (2021) | Neuroscience | [Suffering is] an unpleasant experience associated with negative cognitive, emotional, and autonomic response to a stimulus.29 |
| Del Giglio (2020) | Medical ethics | Suffering [is] defined as a state of undergoing pain, distress, or hardship.30 |
| Devisch (2017) | Psychosomatics | […] suffering is defined as an affective experience that is related to the language-based reflections we make about ourselves and about others.32 |
| Dildy (1996) | Nursing studies | Suffering was found to be a process directed toward regaining normalcy and consisted of three phases: disintegration of self; the shattered self; and reconstruction of self.33 |
| Duggleby (2000) | Nursing studies | Suffering is the basic social problem of pain.34 |
| Dysvik (2013) | Nursing studies | Suffering is a basic emotional experience and a response to illnesses that threaten one's physical or psychosocial integrity.35 |
| Edgar (2007) | Philosophy | [Suffering] is an experience of life never getting better, revealing in the sufferer only vulnerability, futility, and impotence.36 |
| Edwards (2003) | Medical ethics | [S]uffering is something felt. [and] must be distressing in some way for the subject. [and] of some significant duration. […]it must have a fairly central place in the mental life of the subject.37 |
| Fishman (1992) | Psychology | Suffering is a state of mind, an emotional experience that includes thoughts, meanings, and feelings that occur in response to many different causes. […] suffering is defined as a subjective perception of personal and physical disintegration.38 |
| Fordyce (1988) | Psychology | Suffering can be defined as an affective or emotional response in the central nervous system, triggered by nociception or other aversive events, such as loss of a loved one, fear, or threat.39 |
| Frank (2001) | Sociology | At the core of suffering is the sense that something is irreparably wrong with our lives, and wrong is the negation of what could have been right. Suffering resists definition because it is the reality of what is not.40 |
| Glas (2012) | Medical ethics | Suffering is, ultimately, an existential reality […] a way of relating to oneself, and by doing so, a way of relating to one's environment […] The suffering person expresses the inability to maintain a relationship toward the pain or toward other incapacities.43 |
| Gonzalez Baron (2006) | Psycho-oncology | […] the cause of suffering is the rupture of the balance between the evaluation of the threats and the resources to face it.44 |
| Gran (2008) | Nursing studies | [Suffering is] a personal threat to the core of being a whole person.46 |
| Grau (2009) | Medical ethics | Suffering is defined as a negative, complex emotional, and cognitive state, characterized by feeling under constant threat and powerless to confront it, having drained the physical and psychosocial resources that might have made resistance possible.47 |
| Kahn (1986) | Nursing studies | Suffering is defined as an individual's experience of threat to self and is a meaning given to events such as pain or loss.52 |
| Knotek and Knotkova (1998) | Psychology | We consider “suffering” as any unpleasant affective cognitive or affective evaluation of perceived, mentally presented, and processed information.54 |
| Krikorian (2012) | Palliative care | [Suffering is] a multidimensional and dynamic experience of severe stress that occurs when there is a significant threat to the whole person and regulatory processes are insufficient, leading to exhaustion.55 |
| Kugelman (2000) | Health psychology | […] suffering [is] the art of the cultural elaboration of performances of pain. In suffering, ‘I’ take a point of view on pain.56 |
| Lackner et al. (2005) | Psychology | If persistent, pain can compromise quality of life, heighten attentional focus to bodily sensations and other sources of internal experience (eg, worry), and tax adjustment […]. With these changes, psychological distress spreads to and damages other aspects of one's self-concept (e.g., self-evaluative concerns relating to one's self-identity, self- esteem, and role status, […]. These changes make up the long term suffering aspect of pain.57 |
| Lackner & Quigley (2005) | Psychology | […] suffering […] refers to the emotional experiences and long-term meaning the pain.58 |
| Meeker (2014) | Palliative care | Suffering [is] the physical, emotional, and spiritual distress that accompanies advanced life-limiting illness.61 |
| Monin (2009) | Gerontology | […] suffering [is] a holistic construct defined by three measurable dimensions: psychological distress, physical symptoms, and existential/spiritual distress.62 |
| Mount (2007) | Palliative medicine | […] the QOL continuum [is] a dialectic that extends from suffering and anguish at one extreme to an experience of integrity and wholeness at the other.64 |
| Murata (2006) | Palliative care | We defined “psycho-existential suffering” as “pain caused by the extinction of the being and the meaning of the self.65 |
| Norden-feldt (1995) | Medical ethics | Conversely, negative quality of life is of 2 kinds, the emotion of unhappiness and the sensation of pain […]. To denote both sets of cases, we may use the term “suffering”.67 |
| Pilkington (2008) | Nursing studies | […] suffering as an experience of health and quality of life in which one recognizes the possibility of nonbeing.72 |
| Priya (2012) | Sociology | […] suffering [is] overwhelming somatic pain or illness and its anticipation and other forms of severe distress arising in the sociomoral context.74 |
| Pullmann (2002) | Medical ethics | […] suffering [is] the product of [physical], psychosocial, economic, or other factors that frustrate an individual in the pursuit of significant life projects.75 |
| Rodgers (1997) | Nursing studies | Suffering is defined as an individualized, subjective, and complex experience that involves the assignment of an intensely negative meaning to an event or a perceived threat.79 |
| Roxberg (2014) | Theology | Suffering is the opposite of action […] because in action, one exercises one's freedom to acquire something that one desires. […] in suffering, one is the victim of a chain of events that threatens and is out of one's control […].81 |
| Streeck (2020) | Medical ethics | [Suffering is a] complex of physical, emotional, social, and spiritual elements […].84 |
| Strong (1999) | Sociology | The suffering associated with chronic pain can be understood as meanings and actions derived from forms of conversation in which the sufferer participates.85 |
| Svenaeus (2015) | Medical ethics | [Suffering] is found to be a potentially alienating mood overcoming the person and engaging her in a struggle to remain at home in the face of loss of meaning and purpose in life.87,88 |
| Svenaeus (2020) | Medical ethics | See Svenaeus (2015) |
| Tate & Pearlman (2019) | Medical ethics | Child suffering can be understood only as a set of absences—absences of conditions such as love, warmth, and freedom from pain.89,90 |
| Tate (2020) | Medical ethics | See Tate & Pearlman (2019) |
| van Hooft (1998) | Medical ethics | […] suffering is to be understood as the frustration of the tendency towards fulfilment of […] various aspects of our being.92 |
| Wade (1992) | Psychology | [Suffering] involves long-term cognitive or reflective processes that are related to the meanings and implications that pain holds for one's life in general.93,94 |
| Wade (2002) | Psychology | See Wade (1992) |
| Wilson (2007) | Palliative care | […] suffering is held to be a state of severe distress that is subjective and unique to the individual, arising from the perception of threat to one's integrity as a biologic, social, or psychological being.96 |
| Yager (2021) | Psychiatry | Suffering is the subjective experience of pervasive negative mood and psychic pain occupying most of one's mental space for a considerable length of time.98 |
The table lists all articles that explicitly offer a definition of pain-related suffering. For a full list of all articles from our text corpus including study characteristics, see Appendix H, http://links.lww.com/PAIN/C13.