498 ALEXITHYMIA AND PSYCOPATHOLOGY OF ADDICTION: CORRELATION BETWEEN TAS-20 AND SCL-90 Ilario Ritacco1, Federica Di Stefano1 1
Dr., Rome, Italy
INTRODUCTION: Scientific literature highlights a correlation between drug addiction and Alexithyimia. According to recent studies (Atzori, 2018) we assume that Alexithymia is based on a difficulty in making mentally images of emotional experiences due to a lack of integration between their physiological and cognitive elements. In 1970, H. Kristal and H. Raskin observed that drug addicts have experience of their emotions in an undifferentiated and predominantly somatic way, because of their great difficulty in tolerating negative emotions. Recent literature highlights that drug addicts have difficulty to recognize correctly stimuli coming from the body and in interpersonal relationships. The hypothesis that the compulsive behavior observed in all forms of addiction complies with “sensation seeking” triggered from loss of interpersonal, intrapsychic and physical sensitivity has recently been corroborated [Atzori, 2018]. A specific psychopathology of Substance Use Disorders (SUD) has been proposed by applying an exploratory factor analysis to the Symptom Checklist-90 (SCL90) [Maremmani, 2018]. We investigate in this work the correlation between alexithymia and the psychopathological dimensions of SCL90. METHODS: We assessed Alexithymia with TAS-20. We administered TAS 20 and SCL 90 to a sample of fifteen patients with substance use disorder during a psychiatric hospitalization. We used the Pearson index to evaluate the correlation between the scores obtained at TAS-20 and the scores obtained at SCL-90. RESULTS: We found that among all the psychopathological dimensions explored by SCL-90, TAS-20 correlates more with “somatization” and “paranoid ideation”. CONCLUSION: Our results confirm that alexithymia is correlated with somatization and also indicate that it is correlated with paranoid ideation. An abnormal body experience appears to be a central element of the psychopathological nucleus of drug addicts encouraging further studies.
341 THE ALTERATION OF THE SENSORY CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE SELF AS A TRIGGER MECHANISM DETERMINING A CRAVING IN GAMBLING, GAMING AND EATING DISORDERS. A COMPARISON BETWEEN TWO SINGLE CASE STUDIES Emanuela Atzori1 1
'Residenza Tuberose' Procted Therapeutic Community For Adolescent And Young Adults, Rome, Italy
The objective of this paper is to explore potential relationships between perceptual and conceptual difficulties, gambling and gaming, highlighting clinical similarities with eating disorders and substance abuse, and enhancing a research into possible psychic factors at the base of a deficit in the sensory consciousness of the Self, for which the image of the body and the person does not have a deep-seated mental representation, with the consequence that the relationship between the psychological part of his Self and the somatic part of it appears exposed to disintegration. In this paper sensation seeking is conceptualized as an attempt to overcome an interoceptive, an exteroceptive, and a proprioceptive difficulty (Atzori, 2017; Atzori, 2018). The craving and the repetition of pathological behavior is interpreted as an attempt to reconstruct the body scheme in a fragmented Self or at risk of fragmentation through a memory of the sensations experienced using an inanimate object, or self-stimulating behavior, in relationship with which an increase of symbolic capability, achievable only through a human relationship, is impossible (Atzori, 2017; Atzori, 2018). Methods: To corroborate thiese hypothesis I propose a comparison between a single-case study of comorbidity with gambling and eating disorder, and a single case-study of gaming and eating disorder. The use of standardized instruments as EDI-3, TAS-20, SCL-90-r, tested and retested over a period of 2 years, has been flanked with the interpretation of dreams, based on the theoretical Platform of Massimo Fagioli's "Human Birth THeory". Results: Scale scores test-retest and contents expressed with oneiric activity seem to demonstrate strong similarities between gambling, gaming, eating disorders and substance abuse. A significant qualitative and quantitative positive reaction to the psychotherapy is expressed in both studies, corroborating my interpretative hypothesis about sensation seeking and craving. Conclusions: These results encourage successive controls of this hypothesis with further studies.