Advances in the study of demoralization: An overview

Demoralization is the clinical presentation of many, if not all, individuals who seek psychotherapy, many patients with medical illnesses ("giving up-given up complex"), patients in the emergency departments ("crisis") and even patients with chronic mental illness ("social breakdown syndrome"). This unifying clinical construct was introduced in the psychiatric literature by Jerome D. Frank in his 1961 book Persuasion and Healing. By studying hundreds of patients with standard scientific methods, he demonstrated that successful psychotherapy worked by correcting assumptions that provoked demoralization and helping the patients restore their sense of mastery of their situations 1-5 .