Chapter 10 - Disorders featuring somatic symptoms Flashcards
Factitious Disorder
- Patients intentionally produce or feign physical symptoms
- Often research their ailments and are impressively knowledgeable about medicine
- Also known as Munchausen Syndrome
Conversion Disorder
- Characterized by medically unexplained physical symptoms that affect voluntary motor or sensory functioning
- Inconsistent with known medical diseases
Somatic Symptom Disorder
people become disproportionately concerned, distressed and disrupted by bodily symptoms they are experiencing and their lives are greatly disrupted by these symptoms
Illness anxiety Disorder
people who are anxious about their health become preoccupied with he notion that they are seriously ill despite the absence of bodily symptoms
Psychological factors Affecting other medical conditions Disorder
Psychological factors adversely affect a person’s general medical condition
Mind-body Dualism
Claims that the mind or soul is totally separate form the body
Malingering
Intentionally feigning illness to achieve some external gain, such as financial compensation or deferment from military service
Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy
Parents or caretakers make up or produce physical illnesses in their children, leading in some cases to repeated painful diagnostic testing, medication and surgery
Conversion and somatic symptom disorders are known as this
Hysterical disorders
Briquet’s syndrome
- type of somatization pattern
- ailments often include pain symptoms, gastrointestinal symptoms, and neurological type-symptoms
- discovered by Pierre Briquet
Predominant pain pattern
- key symptom is pain
- concerns and disruption produced by the pain are disproportionate to its severity and seriousness
Nancy School
- They were able to produce hysterical symptoms in normal people - deafness, paralysis, blindness, and numbness - by hypnotic suggestion and they could remove the symptoms by the same means
- Founded by Liebault and Bernheim
Primary Gain
when their bodily symptoms keep their internal conflicts out of awareness
Secondary Gain
when their bodily symptoms further enable them to avoid unpleasant activities or to receive sympathy from others
Cognitive behavioral view
- They propose that the physical symptoms of these disorders yield important benefits to sufferers
- believe that rewards are the primary cause of the development of disorders
Psychodynamic theorists
view gains as indeed secondary, that is, as gains that come only after underlying conflicts produce the disorders
Communication realm
- some cognitive-behavioral theorists propose that conversion and somatic symptom disorders are forms of self-expression, providing a means for people to reveal emotions that would otherwise be difficult for them to convey
What do theorists believe the purpose of conversion is?
- it is not to defend against anxiety but to communicate extreme feelings - anger, fear, depression, guilt, jealousy - in a “physical language” that is familiar and comfortable for the person with the disorder
Who displays the most somatic reactions?
- Latin America
- Says that the psychological reactions to life events are often influence by ones culture
How are Conversion and Somatic symptom disorders treated?
- Psychotherapy
- Psychotropic drug therapy
- both
Pyschodynamic therapists treat conversion and somatic symptom disorder how?
- they try to get them to become conscious of and resolve their underlying fears, thus eliminating the need to convert anxiety into physical symptoms
Cognitive-behavioral therapists treat conversion and somatic symptom disorder how?
- exposure treatments
- expose clients to features of the horrific events that first triggered their physical symptoms, expecting that the clients will become less anxious over the course of repeated exposures and more able to face those upsetting events directly rather than through physical channels
Illness Anxiety Disorder (Hyperchondriasis)
Chronically anxious about their health and are convinced that they have or are developing a serious medical illness, despite the absence of symptoms
Cognitive-behavioral theorists believe illness anxiety disorder
- Illness fears are acquired through classical conditioning or modeling
- People with the disorder are so sensitive to and threatened by bodily cues that they come to misinterpret them