Conversion disorder: advances in our understanding.

than two millennia and used to describe atypical signs and symptoms that did not conform to established diseases, disappeared from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association’s classification of mental disorders. Critics had argued that the condition lacked validity and that it owed its longevity to tradition. Moreover, the term was pejorative with its fallacious association to uterine pathology. Abolishing the word did not, however, re move a disorder, nor did it lead to fresh insights as to the condition’s cause, given the largely descriptive content of the DSM. It also did not adequately solve the taxonomy conundrum.