Juan Moisés De La Serna - High Sensitivity And Mental Health

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 of the world’s population. Several scientists from different countries have provided contrasting data on this particular way of feeling, thinking, and acting.

Up until now, science has shown us through studies conducted, that approximately 20% of the population has High Sensitivity (Aron and Aron, 1997). These are people with an innate ability to observe the smallest details and they do so unconsciously. They also need more rest time as they are easily overstimulated and must learn to manage their emotions in the face of excessive noise or crowded places. They show strong emotional responses and sometimes require more downtime. Likewise, the authors affirm that of this percentage of people who possess the trait of high sensitivity, 70% are introverts.

The development of the Highly Sensitive Child scale and identification of sensitivity groups (Pluess, 2017), published in Developmental Psychology is also a statistical study. Among its results is the existence of three different groups with different levels of environmental sensitivity. It indicates that all living beings must be sensitive to their surroundings and classifies 25-35% as highly sensitive, 41-47% as intermediate, and 20-35% as low.

The Highly Sensitive Person presents characteristics from birth that accompany them throughout their lives. These characteristics affect their well-being and as a result, their mental health. Elaine Aron, a pioneer research psychologist in the United States, highlighted the following particularities of HSP people: they can unconsciously show a heightened awareness of and strong reaction when encountering stimuli in their surroundings, even when these are subtle. This intense emotional reaction is because everything, both positive and negative, affects the HSP more. They also experience high levels of arousal due to sensory stimulation to noises, smells, and other sensations. A high capacity for empathy and increased sensory sensitivity to stimuli, which is manifested by a heightened ability to differentiate sensations is also found in the HSP.

The highly sensitive person and highly sensitive children are individuals who come by these personality traits naturally. They could focus these traits toward a positive outcome avoiding a negative path provided they have an awareness of their uniqueness and the proper tools to cope with the difficulties that may arise along the way, as well as knowledge of how to enhance their strengths. They are people with a gift because of their great creativity and their ability to process information. But they are also people who can easily become stressed or who tend to avoid certain social situations. Hence, the importance of knowing whether or not you are a Highly Sensitive Person and whether or not your child is a Highly Sensitive Child.