Psychology & Psychiatry

Why Freud was right about hysteria

A 35-year-old woman loses the use of her legs, suddenly becoming paralysed from the waist down. In another case, a woman feels an overwhelming compulsion to close her eyes, until eventually she cannot open them at all. After ...

Psychology & Psychiatry

Recall of stressful events caught in pictures

(Medical Xpress)—In a world first, University of Melbourne researchers along with international collaborators have used Functional Magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine brain function to help better understand the ...

Diseases, Conditions, Syndromes

Mass hysteria rare, but usually seen in girls

(AP) -- Fifteen teenage girls report a mysterious outbreak of spasms, tics and seizures in upstate New York. But tests find nothing physically wrong.

Conversion disorder is a neurosis marked by the appearance of physical symptoms such as partial loss of muscle function without physical cause but in the presence of psychological conflict. Symptoms include numbness, blindness, paralysis, or fits without a neurological cause. It is thought that these problems arise in response to difficulties in the patient's life, and conversion is considered a psychiatric disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 4th edition (DSM-IV).

Formerly known as "hysteria", the disorder has arguably been known for millennia, though it came to greatest prominence at the end of the 19th century, when the neurologists Jean-Martin Charcot and Sigmund Freud and psychiatrist Pierre Janet focused their studies on the subject. The term "conversion" has its origins in Freud's doctrine that anxiety is "converted" into physical symptoms. Though previously thought to have vanished from the west in the 20th century, some research has suggested it is as common as ever.

The DSM-IV classifies conversion disorder as a somatoform disorder while the ICD-10 classifies it as a dissociative disorder.

This text uses material from Wikipedia licensed under CC BY-SA