Multiple Chemical Sensitivity: Psychological Aspects

Multiple chemical sensitivity is not a new problem. The North American allergist Teron G. Randolph referred to this type of health difficulty in the 1950s. However, in recent years it has become more visible, although no answer has yet been found to explain it.

The error may be in the scientist and organic mania that has gripped medicine for a long time. That is, in the idea that everything happens in the body and must have an exclusively organic explanation. From that perspective, the mind is just a by-product without much relevance.

That is one of the reasons why many diseases  are still classified as simply “idiopathic”, that is, of unknown cause. However, there are perspectives in which an answer is given to this supposed darkness of the cause, through the processes of the mind. The psychosomatic is a reality that is not always given the importance it deserves.

Multiple chemical sensitivity

Multiple chemical sensitivity is one of those health problems that can be a candidate to enter the drawer of psychosomatic illnesses. It is part of a good group of diseases for which organic medicine does not find an explanation or a cure, such as fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue syndrome.

From the most integrative approaches, which do give the mind a role in disease, multiple chemical sensitivity is part of a group of disorders that have been called “environmental distress” or “intoxication distress. ” In this case, they are seen more as the fruit of psychological processes, than as the failure of an organ or organic system.

In nonorganicist approaches, what is in multiple chemical sensitivity is, above all, anguish ; that is to say, fear. To what or why? It is a fear that can be associated either with the person’s immediate social environment or with the deterioration of the natural environment and the multitude of information in this regard.

The characteristics of the problem

What characterizes multiple chemical sensitivity is a set of adverse reactions, which arise when a person comes into contact with some odors, certain foods or certain physical factors, such as electromagnetic radiation. Contact leads to unpleasant reactions, such as the following:

• Adverse reactions in the nervous system. They include extreme tiredness, weakness, headache, dizziness, fainting, sleep disturbances, and concentration or memory problems.

• Irritation symptoms. Irritation appears in some area of ​​the body, generally in the eyes or respiratory system.
• Digestive symptoms. Diarrhea, flatulence, stomach pain, feeling sick to your stomach, etc.

It is not easy for a doctor to identify the cause of these reactions. On some occasions, there is indeed a toxic agent that causes specific effects. However, this factor being ruled out, in most cases what underlies this situation is deep anguish.

Horizons

Definitely the smell of ordinary detergent cannot cause such marked symptoms. That at least is what the studies carried out to date tell us; therefore, problems such as multiple chemical sensitivity are labeled “idiopathic.” What can happen is that the smell of detergent is unconsciously associated with a threat, even if it is nonexistent.

Freud would say that these types of manifestations are hysterical reactions. There is a repressed content in the mind of a person and it returns through those kinds of symptoms that are so difficult to explain. As in many of the cases treated by Freud, a simple object or an apparently unimportant stimulus is the window that opens onto the world of the repressed.

Other currents of psychology refer to this type of problem as perception and belief phenomena. The idea that this element is harmful has been internalized and the mind reacts accordingly to that conviction. The way out in this case would be to rationalize those fears, stripping elements that do not cause harm of the threatening valuation.

It should be noted that the psychological is not “what is invented by the mind. ” That the origin is in the repression or in the belief does not mean that the problem is not real. Rather, it is the effect of an organ that is much more than an organ: the sophisticated human brain and the mind to which it gives rise.