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Good Morning!
• Have you ever faked being sick?
• Why did you do it?
• How did it work out for you?
Somatoform Disorders
Somatoform Disorders
• Experiencing physical symptoms of a disease for which there is no
apparent physical cause
• known as hysteria in Freud’s time
• Two types
• Conversion disorder – psychological loss of a specific voluntary body function
(thought to be an attempt to avoid a conflict); For example, a woman who
lives in terror of blurting out things that she does not want to say may lose
the power of speech
• Hypochondriasis – becoming preoccupied with imaginary ailments;
unrealistically interpret normal aches and pains as symptoms of a more
serious illness.
Factitious Disorder (Munchausen’s Syndrome) –
• patients feign physical or emotional illness in order to assume the role
as patient
• patients have added sugar to urine samples, used sandpaper,
chemicals, or heat to create rashes and lesions, drank animal blood so
they could vomit blood, swallowed corrosive chemicals, overdosed on
psychoactive drugs
• Disease is difficult to diagnose and often requires being “caught” in
the act.
Dissociative Disorders
Background/Misc.
• a breakdown in a person’s normal conscious experience, such as a
loss of memory or identity
• some believe dissociative disorders are an attempt to escape from a
part of the self that one fears; allows them to reduce anxiety by
forgetting stressful events or aspects of their personality
dissociative amnesia
• inability to recall important events or information; usually associated
with stressful events; this is basically amnesia with no physical cause
and is distinct from repression because it typically involves forgetting
basic knowledge of oneself (like their name, where they live and
work, their family…)
dissociative fugue
• a person suddenly and unexpectedly travels away from home or work
and is unable to recall the past (amnesia plus flight); lasts for days to
decades; when individual comes out of fugue, he/she has no memory
of the fugue period.
Dissociative identity disorder
• (previously known as multiple personality disorder) – person exhibits
two or more distinct identities that take control at different times.
• DID sufferers usually suffered sever physical, psychological, or sexual
abuse as a child
• Existence of DID is highly controversial
• Evidence to support – distinct brain states associated with different
personalities, changes in eye-muscle balance as patients switch identities
• Evidence against – subjects told to pretend they had been accused of murder
and were being examined by psychiatrist -- most spontaneously pretended to
have a second personality; disease virtually non-existent outside North
America, following publicity of disease in the 1960’s and 70’s, diagnoses
increased 10,000 fold