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Conversion disorders, psychogenic seizures: These now fall under the umbrella term “functional neurologic disorders.” Regardless of the name, these diagnoses take us very close to the cliff edge where we can do harm, when despite our careful verbal dancing, patients hear, “It’s all in your head”. Take long COVID or chronic fatigue syndrome, for example. As one patient said, a neurologist told me, “All your symptoms are psychosomatic. You have a conversion disorder caused by a distant trauma you can’t recall.”
Hi! Jim Phelps here for the Psychopharmacology Institute. Are psychiatric conditions impairments of the mind and neurologic conditions purely structural neuroanatomical problems? One reference suggests that this is a “false Cartesian dualism.” And yet by definition, functional neurologic disorders, the new euphemism, are defined as “neurologic symptoms, for example, weakness, abnormal movements, or nonepileptic seizures that are inconsistent with a neurologic disease.” The strong implication is that neurologic diseases
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