Itch Management: Psychotherapeutic Approach

A relationship between the intensity of itch and psychological factors like stress, coping, anxiety, and depression has often been shown in patients with skin diseases. Moreover, the biopsychosocial model of chronic itch nicely summarizes how psychological factors can contribute to a worsening or improvement of chronic itch. Thus, it is reasonable to consider psychological interventions in the treatment of chronic itch. In this chapter we focus on itch-scratch problems as well as stress and anxiety/depression as itch-increasing factors. We summarize the evidence of psychological interventions which can reduce these triggering factors. Hereby, we differentiate between unimodal and multimodal interventions, and emphasize that not every single intervention might help for all patients, but that a comprehensive anamnesis is needed in order to determine whether one or several psychological factors trigger itch in the particular patient.