[Mental disorders and gastrointestinal pathology. Part 1]

Current medical literature pays increasingly more attention to diseases collectively referred to as psychosomatoses. Combination of psychic and somatic disorders in a single patient is a common occurrence. Timely recognition of psychic problems in patients managed in general practice settings not only increases efficacy of the treatment process at large but also permits to avoid unnecessary prescription of potent drugs, surgical intervention, and inappropriate hospitalization in case of a psychic disease disguised under a somatic disorder. This paper is focused on psychic conditions associated with gastrointestinal diseases. Part 1 contains general characteristic of psychic disturbances, describes their role in the formation of psychosomatic symptomocomplex, and discusses psychic pathologies and depressive states most frequently encountered in practical work of general practitioners and in the population at large.