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Somatic Symptom Disorder
Stacey Buchanan Going
November 24th, 2013
What is Somatic Symptom Disorder?
A mental disorder with persistent and clinically somatic complaints
This is coupled with: Excessive thoughts, feelings and rash
behaviors about the symptoms Ranges from mild to severe
Types of Somatic Symptom Disorders
Four somatic symptom disorders listed Complex somatic symptom disorder Factitious Disorder Conversion Disorder Somatic Symptoms (not otherwise
specified)
DSM V Criteria for Diagnosis
One or more somatic symptoms Excessive thoughts, feelings, behaviors
that relate to somatic symptoms (or associated w/ health concerns
Somatic symptom does not have to always be present but must be persistent
Examples of Somatic Symptoms
Headaches Stomach aches Even as severe as blindness, or inability to
walk Most likely in Conversion disorder
Prevalence of Somatic Symptom Disorder
Hilderink et al 2012 11 to 21% in younger adults 10 to 20% in middle age adults 1.5 to 13% in older adults
Biological/Environmental Factors
Most well known cause: stress or exposure to trauma
Strong correlation between anxiety, depression, and somatic symptoms
Treatments
Psychotherapy Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Hard to treat because
Hard to convince patient it is not an actual medical symptom
For factitious disorder- you treat the behavior not the illness
Future Research
Anxiety causes somatic symptoms or does somatic symptoms cause anxiety?
Changes from the DSM-IV and V How does it effect the prevalence of
disorder Will it lead to more misdiagnosis
Implications
Not much known about treatments of somatic symptom disorder
The least known about somatic disorder is Conversion Disorder
Because of the severity and the inability to find anything medically wrong with them
The symptoms disappear as fast as they appear