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SOMATO DISORDER
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Somatoform disorders are characterized by the presence of physical symptoms that
cannot be explained by a medical condition or another mental illness. Thus, physicians
often judge that such symptoms result from psychological conflicts or distress.
The term somatoform comes from the Greek word soma, meaning “body.”
EXAMPLE:
HYSTERIA
 a person may experience blindness, deafness, or seizures, but a physician cannot find
anything wrong with the person.
 type of mental illness, in which emotionally laden mental conflicts appear as physical
symptoms, called conversion reactions, or as severe mental dissociation. In modern
psychological classification, hysteria is known as somatization disorder or conversion
disorder, depending on the specific symptoms displayed.
 Psychiatric diagnosis of hysteria depends on recognition of a mental conflict and of the
unconscious connections between conflict and symptoms. The term mass hysteria is
applied to situations in which a large group of people exhibit the same kinds of physical
symptoms with no organic cause.
 For example, one incident of mass hysteria reported in 1977 involved 57 members of a
high school marching band who experienced headache, nausea, dizziness, and fainting
after a football game. After a fruitless search for organic causes, researchers concluded
that a heat reaction among a few band members had spread by emotional suggestion to
other members of the band. The term collective stress reaction is now preferred for these
situations.
STUDY AND TREATMENT
The ancient Greeks accounted for the instability and mobility of physical symptoms and
of attacks of emotional disturbance in women, when these were otherwise unaccountable,
by a theory that the womb somehow became transplanted to different positions. This
“wandering of the uterus” theory gave the name hysteria (Greek hystera, “uterus”) to
disease phenomena characterized by highly emotional behavior. During the Middle Ages
hysteria was attributed to demonic possession and to witchcraft, which led to persecution.
As the sciences of anatomy and physiology developed in the 19th century, a tendency to
interpret all mental phenomena in terms of diseased structure of the brain became
apparent in medical circles. At the end of the 19th century, however, the French
neurologist Jean Martin Charcot demonstrated that morbid ideas could produce physical
manifestations. Subsequently his pupil, the French psychologist Pierre Janet, formulated
a description of hysteria as a psychological disorder. Later Austrian psychoanalyst
Sigmund Freud began to develop the theory that hysterical symptoms are the result of
conflict between the social and ethical standards of an individual and an unsuccessfully
repressed wish.
Current treatment of hysteria consists of some form of psychotherapy and, in some cases,
prolonged forms of analytic psychotherapy, or of psychoanalysis. For cases of acute
hysteria associated with anxiety, tranquilizing medication may also be necessary (see
Tranquilizer). see Mental Illness: Somatoform Disorders.
In the late 1900s and early 2000s, neuroimaging techniques such as positron emission
tomography (PET) enabled researchers to identify parts of the brain that appear to be
involved in conversion disorder. When activated inappropriately—by emotional stress,
for example—these neurons may disrupt brain circuitry and hamper motor or sensory
functioning, thus producing the physical symptoms associated with hysteria. Such
research suggests that hysteria is a neurological disorder.
HYPOCHONDRIASIS
 constantly fear that they will develop a serious disease and misinterpret minor physical
symptoms as evidence of illness.
 traditional term for a morbid condition characterized by the simulation of the symptoms
of any of several diseases. Convinced of a grave illness, the hypochondriac may suffer
acutely, not only from the symptoms of the presumed disease, but also from anxiety and
melancholia.
 In modern psychological classification the term has largely been replaced with
hypochondriasis, which is more precisely defined as any illness or symptom for which no
specific cause can be determined.
 Psychiatrists and physicians also recognize that a congenital hypersensitivity may
predispose a person to hypochondriasis.