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