Predicting Readiness to Engage in Psychotherapy of People with Chronic Pain Based on their Pain-Related Narratives Saar

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that analyzing patients' pain narratives with NLP can reliably predict their readiness to engage in psychotherapy, potentially enabling earlier and more personalized psychosocial interventions for chronic pain sufferers.

Contribution

It introduces a novel NLP-based method to predict psychotherapy engagement readiness from pain narratives, enhancing patient-centered care in chronic pain management.

Findings

Perception-domain model achieved 95.7% accuracy in predicting readiness.

Narrative sentence count correlated with readiness levels.

NLP screening can facilitate earlier psychosocial intervention.

Abstract

Background. Chronic pain afflicts 20 % of the global population. A strictly biomedical mind-set leaves many sufferers chasing somatic cures and has fuelled the opioid crisis. The biopsychosocial model recognises pain subjective, multifactorial nature, yet uptake of psychosocial care remains low. We hypothesised that patients own pain narratives would predict their readiness to engage in psychotherapy. Methods. In a cross-sectional pilot, 24 chronic-pain patients recorded narrated pain stories on Painstory.science. Open questions probed perceived pain source, interference and influencing factors. Narratives were cleaned, embedded with a pretrained large-language model and entered into machine-learning classifiers that output ready/not ready probabilities. Results. The perception-domain model achieved 95.7 % accuracy (specificity = 0.80, sensitivity = 1.00, AUC = 0.90). The factors-influencing-pain model yielded 83.3 % accuracy (specificity = 0.60, sensitivity = 0.90, AUC = 0.75). Sentence count correlated with readiness for perception narratives (r = 0.54, p < .01) and factor narratives (r = 0.24, p < .05). Conclusion. Brief spoken pain narratives carry reliable signals of willingness to start psychosocial treatment. NLP-based screening could help clinicians match chronic-pain patients to appropriate interventions sooner, supporting a patient-centred biopsychosocial pathway.