High Sensitivity And Mental Health. Dr. Juan Moisés De La Serna

Pathological self-criticism of the highly sensitive person

       7.3. Depression vs. High Sensitivity

       Chapter 8. Highly Sensitive Patients

       8.1 What concerns High Sensitivity professionals

       8.2. Why HSCs are mistaken as having other disorders

       8.3. When being an HSC becomes a problem.

       8.4. When being an HSC becomes an advantage.

       8.5. What I can do when teaching HSC?

       8.6. When should I seek help for my HSC?

       8.7. What can I do as a parent of an HSC?

       8.8. What do statistics say about HSC, regarding culture, gender, and genetics.

       Chapter 9. Problems derived from high sensitivity.

       9.1. How to act in social situations if you are an HSP

       9.2. Mindfulness to help highly sensitive people

       9.3. Troubleshooting as therapy for highly sensitive people

       9.4 Systemic family therapy applied to families with HSP members

Chapter 1. Introduction to the study of the relationship between High Sensitivity and Mental Health

      Whether you are a highly sensitive person or a mental health professional, you will benefit from reading this book. You may be a person who has discovered your highly sensitive trait as a result of not feeling too good about yourself. Or maybe you have spent years going to psychologists and psychiatrists, or have been looking for information until someone enlightened you with knowledge of the existence of Highly Sensitive People (HSP). You may be a professional who has cared for people you could not quite manage to understand, people who did not exactly have a disorder but there was something that prevented them from growing and continuing their journey in life with ease. Perhaps, your case is that of an individual who is having a hard time communicating with your partner because it seems that you are each speaking a different language since each one feels and perceives the world differently. You may have even left a job due to feeling like you did not fit in, whether with others or with repetitive and routine tasks.

      We all indeed have sensitivity and it is also true that anyone may need at some point in their life to go to a psychology professional to resolve something whether small or big. This book aims to provide a way to work with highly sensitive people.

      What is written here will help you not only to identify the trait but also to detect the psychological consequences of it from a psychology professional point of view. It addresses High Sensitivity (HS) or Sensory Processing Sensitivity (SPS) as seen by mental health experts, a contribution of experiences, studies, and scientific basis.

      We will define what it means to be a highly sensitive person and your relationship with your environment from the strictest sense of the word. By reading this book you will learn about the most common psychological disorders and why highly sensitive people can suffer from them. You will understand the talent and the high capacity that highly sensitive people possess. All this is explained from a psychological point of view.

      No doubt, the experiences of highly sensitive people serve as an example to us. However, we want to raise awareness among the HSP and HSC population of the importance of putting themselves in the hands of health professionals. It is the psychologists, counselors, pediatricians, and psychiatrists trained in High Sensitivity who are the most adept at solving the problems you may encounter.

      It is essential to keep in mind that being highly sensitive is not the same as having a disorder. There are specific treatments currently being developed by scientific researchers. Possessing the trait of high sensitivity can lead you to suffer certain difficulties but also benefit from many advantages. The detection and diagnosis of any disorder associated with the trait should be left in the hands of mental health experts.

      It is just as important to know who to turn to so you can find solutions if you possess the Highly Sensitive trait and questions arise, as well as to know that anyone around you can be an HSP.

      It is also essential to trust the sciences, and psychology is one of them. Psychological techniques and treatments are a result of experiments and research that have been carried out by numerous experts over the years. In this book, we aim to make a connection between this scientific precision and the personality trait that we now colloquially know as High Sensitivity. The scientific name for this trait corresponds to Sensory Processing Sensitivity.

      The Highly Sensitive Person has a way of perceiving and feeling that starts from birth and which is molded through experiences. It is a type of personality that includes a high capacity to process information about your surroundings. It makes you more aware of everything that enters through the five senses, especially in new or unexpected situations. The Theory of Positive Disintegration, known to many as a theory of “emotional development” by the Polish psychologist and psychiatrist Dabrowski during the beginning of psychology as a science, classified this ability as part of the different levels of human development.

      This book will provide you with both information and possible solutions if you are someone who is involved in caring for the emotional needs of a person, whether that person is your child, your student, or your patient. In this book, you will find key information not found in other books since it explains the relationship between High Sensitivity and its possible consequences on an individual throughout their life. In addition to delivering a practical approach that can help highly sensitive people to manage their trait or help a person learn how to interact with highly sensitive children, the book provides data and sample consultations, as well as the most recent research on High Sensitivity.

      This book is the result of a collaboration between high-sensitivity professionals and has been written in the form of a research project. It provides information collected from group therapies and individual psychology sessions conducted over several years in mental health departments and addresses some central issues of the daily work of High Sensitivity professionals with children and adolescents. Care of children is a field of great concern regarding study and treatment, especially in the interest of the prevention of possible mental disorders. Young people are the human potential of the near future in companies.

      We have focused on the symptoms that derive from the presence of the highly sensitive trait in an individual under the perspective of the diagnostic axes of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM—5). Risk factors, current treatments, and prevention have been based on cognitive-behavioral therapies. The diagnosis and evaluation provide a comparison and bring to light the possible confusion with some disorders that have similar pathological signs. Regarding the research models described, they include scientific theories at an international level that have been instrumental in the discovery of the High Sensitivity trait.

      At present, there is a lot of research that supports the existence of this peculiar trait in a portion