Posted by SLS on January 28, 2014, at 7:31:40
In reply to My friend and conversion disorder, posted by jono_in_adelaide on January 28, 2014, at 0:03:31
> He was in hospital last week, under another neuro, had CT, MRI, PET, complete blood picture and a spinal, all of which showed nothing.
>
> The doc managed to get his records from the other hospitals/doctors, and told him and his wife that he had conversion disorder and that he was in urgent need of intense psychiatric treatment.
>
> He has compeltely disregarded the advice, and is now talking about going to see a neurologist in another capital city.......Has he been screened for any other somatoform conditions such as somatization?
Perhaps it would be helpful for your friend to understand that his somatic complaints are genuinely biological, but that the site of dysfunction is the brain, not the body. We know that manipulating certain areas of the brain can produce pain and sensory alterations. Somatoform disorders often are the result of psychosocial stresses. The stress can be either acute or chronic, although acute attacks have a better prognosis. It may be that somatoform illnesses settle in different regions of the brain than those affected by PTSD or depression.
Stress on the brain can produce myriad effects that will present differently in each individual. Somatoform is just one of these presentations. It is a brain disorder. There are no universal biological treatments that act as a cure yet. Psychiatrists who specialize in psychosomatic medicine, including somatoform, can be very helpful to catalog the symptoms and work on ways to cope with them as if they were true pathologies - which, of course, they are. The pathology lies in the brain. However, it is through psychological interventions that the magnitude of dysfunction can be reduced.
There is a whole medical journal dedicated to psychosomatics. It has been around for 30 years:
http://www.psychosomaticmedicine.org/
Helpful information from Mayo Clinic:http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/conversion-disorder/basics/definition/con-20029533
- ScottSome see things as they are and ask why.
I dream of things that never were and ask why not.- George Bernard Shaw
poster:SLS
thread:1059722
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20140123/msgs/1059742.html