Pain Disability Index

After a few months of pain in my back, suspicion of hernia (not present) and nerve damage (not existent), I was referred for Rehabilitation, a multidisciplinary treatment that includes professionals from several areas of medicine and others. In my case it was supposed to help me to deal with the pain in my back, that is now seen as Chronic Pain.

On the day I was going to find out if I was accepted for it or not, I showed a report from my Psychotherapist describing my situation. On that same appointment I learned I couldn't receive the Rehabilitation treatment because I was dealing with such important mental disease issues and was already in treatment.

It wasn't easy to receive these news. In a certain way, my pain was now being called psychological. I started thinking how I could address this situation. So I decided to use the Pain Disability Index (that I had used to assess my back pain) to measure the impact of living with these conditions.

I felt I needed to create a sound art piece about it. I wanted to use the constant sensation of split brain, when I think and believe different things at the same time. I wanted to speak about my pains publicly, but discretely, and I also wanted to "count my blessings".

So, here it my newest piece: Pain Disability Index. It's impressive how in some ways this resembles so closely what goes inside my brain at times....