All doctors have encountered patients whose symptoms they cannot explain. These individuals frequently provoke despair and disillusionment. Many doctors make a link between inexplicable physical symptoms and assumed psychiatric ill­ ness. An array of adjectives in medicine apply to symptoms without established organic basis – ‘supratentorial’, ‘psychosomatic’, ‘functional’ – and these are somet...

The diagnosis of conversion disorder is problematic. Since doctors have conceptually and practically differentiated the symptoms from neurological ('organic') disease it has been presumed to be a psychological disorder, but the psychological mechanism, and how this differs from feigning (conscious simulation), has remained elusive. Although misdiagnosis of neurological disease as conversion dis...

Conversion disorder has a history that may reach back into antiquity, and it continues to present a clinical challenge to both psychiatrists and neurologists. This article reviews the current state of knowledge surrounding the prevalence, etiology, and neurobiology of conversion disorder. There have been improvements in the accuracy of diagnosis that are possibly related to improved technologie...

Introduction The aim of this paper is to draw a profile for the people who present with symptoms of conversion disorder through a review of past papers. Methodology Pubmed and PsycInfo were searched using the terms “conversion disorder”, “hysteria” “pseudoseizures”, “dissociative disorders” and “somatoform disorders”. We reviewed the literature published over the last 40 years and examined hist...

BACKGROUND Conversion disorder is largely managed by neurologists, for whom it presents great challenges to understanding and management. This study aimed to quantify these challenges, examining how neurologists understand conversion disorder, and what they tell their patients. METHODS A postal survey of all consultant neurologists in the UK registered with the Association of British Neurolog...