The study aimed to assess the relationship between mental disorders symptoms with pain coping strategies in dentistry clinics.

One hundred and twenty people with dental pain that attended in dentistry clinics were randomly selected and responded to Rosenstein and Keefe's Pain Coping Strategies Questionnaire (PCSQ) and Derogatis's Symptom Checklist (SCL-90-R). PCSQ assesses six pain coping strategies: diverting attention, reinterpretation pain sensation, self-negotiation, ignoring pain, disastrous thought, hope–praying, and SCL-90 measures nine dimensions: somatization, obsessive compulsive, interpersonal sensitivity, depression, anxiety, hostility, phobic anxiety, paranoid ideation, and psychoticism. The data were analysed with Pearson correlation coefficient and independent t-test.

Findings showed positive and significant relationship between disastrous thought with all mental disorders symptoms; and reinterpretation pain sensation with depression and anxiety. Also there is negative significant relationship between ignoring pain with obsessive compulsive, interpersonal sensitivity and somatization; and hope – praying with interpersonal sensitivity, depression, anxiety, paranoid ideation and psychoticism. Meanwhile there were significant differences in males and females. Females got more scores in ignoring pain than males, and males got more scores in anxiety, hostility and paranoid ideation tan females.

With regard to findings, it is recommended that in addition to drug treatment, for changing the attitudes and thinking in patients with dental pain, psychiatrists and psychologists apply psychological treatments specially cognitive-behavior therapy to reduce abnormal thinking level about pain so that the length during of treatment declines, and as a results reduce the personality and health problems that is related with dental pain before and in during of drug treatment.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.