BACKGROUND Munchausen's syndrome by proxy (recently renamed fabricated or induced illness) is a rare form of child abuse, but relatively little is known about the psychopathology of the perpetrators. AIMS To examine the medical, psychiatric, social work and forensic records of mothers referred for detailed psychiatric assessment from 1996 to 2009. METHOD Twenty-eight consecutive individuals...

This selective review considers the rare complaints of the loss of personal memories after successful courses of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which are best characterized as somatoform disorders, rather than as evidence of brain damage, thus warranting psychological treatment for such disorders.

Introduction The somatoform disorders are a group of psychiatric that present with unexplained physical symptoms. Objectives This study aimed at assessing the prevalence and risk factors (SD) their types among patients attending major clinic in Duhok Governorate/Kurdistan Region Iraq. Our secondary aim was to assess common presenting symptoms conversion disorder (CD). Methods 637 subjects were ...

BACKGROUND Factitious and somatoform-disorder patients are alike in that they both organize their lives around seeking medical services in spite of having primarily a psychiatric condition. In DSM-IV, the key difference is that factitious-disorder patients feign illness, and somatoform-disorder patients actually believe they are ill. Although patients may not be conscious of their motivation or...

The 20-item Somatoform Dissociation Questionnaire (SDQ-20; Nijenhuis, Spinhoven, Van Dyck, Van der Hart, & Vanderlinden, 1996) evaluates the severity of somatoform dissociation. The SDQ-20 items were derived from a pool of 75 items describing clinically observed somatoform dissociative symptoms that in clinical settings had appeared upon reactivation of particular dissociative parts of the pers...

OBJECTIVE Cognitive processes are considered to be relevant to the etiology and maintenance of somatoform disorders (SFDs). The aim of this study was to assess explicit and implicit information-processing bias for disorder-congruent information in SFDs. METHODS A clinical sample of 33 patients suffering from multiple somatoform symptoms (SSI-3/5) and 25 healthy controls performed an encoding ...

OBJECTIVE To identify the similarities and differences of risk factors and correlates of different groups of people fulfilling criteria for specified diagnostic groups according to current somatoform disorder (SDs) criteria, presence of anxiety and/or depression, and self-reported musculoskeletal disorders. METHODS Participants of the Oslo-Lofoten general population cross-sectional study in 2...

OBJECTIVE To examine analytically the question of whether the characterization of somatoform disorders (SFDs) in Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV) provides adequate grounds for classifying them as mental disorders rather than as physical disorders. METHODS Analytical examination. RESULTS There are prima facie grounds for classifying SFDs as physical disorders since ...