The Psychological Attributes of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery Patients and Effects of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery

Chi, Kyung Whan; Lee, Sang Ick

Abstract

OBJECTIVES
Along with the fact that people change their attitude on aesthetic surgery, many people become to have positive viewpoint on aesthetic surgery. However, according to the recent study result, it showed that aesthetic surgery patients tend to have psychopathology. To investigate effects of aesthetic surgery and tendency of aesthetic surgery patients which is presumed to be changed, various psychological evaluations were performed in the sample who had undergone aesthetic surgery. Also psychiatric and psychological attributes of aesthetic plastic surgery patients were compared with those of reconstructive surgery group and those of normal controls. METHOD: 50 of reconstructive surgery group and 50 of normal control group were selected from Dept. of Plastic Surgery of Chungbuk National University Hospital and two private plastic surgery clinics in Cheong-ju. To find out each group's psychological attributes, pre- and post-operative psychological conditions were evaluated by administering basic survey, body image scale, ego identity scale, and SCL-90-R. RESULT: 1) Patients in the group of reconstructive surgery received more stress than those in the group of aesthetic surgery and normal controls. 2) There were no significant differences in the scores of body image scale, ego identity scale and SCL-90-R between reconstructive surgery group and normal control group. 3) After aesthetic surgery, aesthetic surgery group showed improvement in almost every item in SCL-90-R, such as somatization, obsessive-compulsive, interpersonal sensitivity, depression, anxiety, hostility, paranoid ideation, GSI, PSDI and PST sub-scales. 4) The factors which affected on the satisfaction after surgery among group of aesthetic surgery were self-acceptance, uniqueness in self-identity scale and obsessive-compulsive, somatization in SCL-90-R. When self-acceptance was low and self-uniqueness was high, satisfaction was high. And the more patients complained about physical symptom, satisfaction was low. 5) The factors which influenced on the opinion of re-operation among group of aesthetic surgery were stability in self-identity scale, obsessive-compulsive and somatization in SCL-90-R, and physical health in body image scale. When stability was low, complaints about physical symptoms were high, viewpoint on one's health was negative and the chance of re-operation was high. 6) In group of aesthetic surgery, the higher the expectation was before surgery, the lower the satisfaction was after surgery.
CONCLUSION
As described in above study result, patients who planned to have aesthetic surgery were not different from common people in terms of psychopathology. And it was also found that aesthetic surgery could improve patients' mental health. If simply administrable evaluation method to measure complaints about physical symptoms, viewpoint on one's health, stability and obsessive-compulsive is invented in the near future, it will be possible to screen patients who are likely to have low satisfaction after surgery and high tendency to have re-operation.