Case study report

Case: Psychological Stress in Rheumatoid Arthritis patient.

Rheumatoid arthritis is a chronic inflammatory and progressive disease leading to joint damage
and physical/mental disability. The disease causes a significant burden in terms of medical,
economic and social costs.
Psychological stress was defined as the feeling of “social isolation” and “being a burden” as
demanding help in everyday activities. The mental and physical health of patients deteriorated
and about 50% of patients required support in everyday activities. Patients feel rejected from the
social activities. Rheumatoid arthritis patients are depending on individual support in daily
activities. The dependency (“being a burden”), and the limitations in social activities (“social
isolation”) cause considerable harm to the RA patient and are perceived as psychological stresses
(distresses).
Patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis can use a problem based coping strategies for coping up with
the stress. Problem Focused Coping is a coping strategy based on planful problem-solving which
involves conscious attempts to determine and execute the most appropriate course of action
needed to directly prevent, eliminate, or significantly improve a stressful situation. But even for
the problem focused coping strategy would require a very strong and reliable psychological
resources. Such a psychological resource can only be one’s family and friend. With help from
their family an RA patient can easily cope up with the psychological stress that has been building
up because of the disease.
RA patients can use the ACT or Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to intervene with the
stressful situations and help them cope up. Because the basic objective of ACT is to accept one's
current circumstances, become more at ease with them, and then gain the ability to do so with the
least amount of stress possible.
Meditation is a very useful therapy for this kind of stress because the basic objective of the ACT
is to accept one's present circumstances, grow more comfortable with them, and then get
empowered to move beyond them with less stress.
You can practice being aware of stressors and then learning to let go of the desire to react by
engaging in mindfulness and meditation practices. You may experience less stress from this type
of stress as a result.
Jon Kabat-Zinn created the group programme known as mindfulness-based stress reduction in
the 1970s to help people who were dealing with physical and/or mental illness as well as the
challenges of daily living. Although it was initially developed to help hospital patients, a wide
spectrum of people from all walks of the life have subsequently successfully employed it. A
versatile and adaptable method of stress reduction is MBSR. It is made up of two parts: yoga and
mindfulness meditation.