Interest Statement and Biography

Beth Darnall, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor and Clinical Pain Psychologist in the Department of Anesthesiology & Perioperative Medicine at Oregon Health & Science University.  She is a women’s health researcher and is funded by the NIH Office for Research on Women’s Health.  Her research focuses on mechanisms and psychological treatments for women with chronic pain of all types.  One of her lines of research examines how thinking negatively about pain increases circulating inflammatory factors in women with chronic pain. She is also particularly interested in gender specific treatment for women with chronic pain.

Clinically, she is a pain psychologist at the Comprehensive Pain Center and works with women individually and in groups.  Goals for treatment including helping women improve their mind-body connection, developing a skill set to decrease stress and pain responses, improving acceptance around the limitations that chronic pain sets, minimizing the need for pain medication, and addressing relationship issues that arise from life with chronic pain.  Her own experience with a 5-year chronic pain condition led her to pursue a career that focuses on pain in women and to help other women with chronic pain improve the quality of their lives.

She is on the Board of Directors for the Pain Society of Oregon, serves as scientific advisor to End The Pain Project, and has appeared on KATU-TV to discuss pain psychology for women.