What are the most common symptoms of conversion disorder?
Conversion patients may have a wide range of complaints. Common symptoms include problems with sensory function, defects in the ability to move through the body, pain and other neurological complaints. Due to the diversity of presentations, it may be difficult to diagnose this psychological disorder. Often it may be difficult to distinguish symptoms caused by the basic health condition from symptoms associated with conversion disorder. Great attention to the constellation of the symptoms present may point to the diagnosis of conversion disorder, especially if the symptoms are unable to explain by other diagnoses.
One of the common categories of symptoms of conversion disorders are problems with a feeling. Patients might feel that one or more of their five senses does not work properly. For example, patients may report blindness or loss of part of their vision. They could complain about numbness or tingling throughout their body. Other patients with this disorder may have is legal hearing. One common symptom is paralysis, which is the inability to move with a certain part of the body. Patients could report quadriplegia, an inability to move all four limbs or hemiparesis, an inability to move either by the left or right half of the body. Other motor function problems may include inability to speak, unstable walking and urination problems.
pain is another of the most common symptoms of conversion disorder. Patients can complain about pain in any part of their body. The common location of the pain is head, joints, limbs, abdomen and pelvis. Pain characteristics may vary from patient to patient and can be sharp, boring, cramps or painful nature.
other neurological complainti are sometimes considered symptoms of conversion disorder. Some patients report activity similar to seizures in which parts of their body shake uncontrollably. Others have episodes of fainting orloss of consciousness. Symptoms of amnesia and the inability to remember from the past are other common complaints in these patients.
The diagnosis can be complicated due to the fact that the symptoms of conversion disorder are sometimes, but not always, in line with other known diseases. For example, many people with moves have a rude speech paired with a weakness on the one hand of their bodies. A patient with conversion disorder could have these symptoms or may have a weakness in the right arm and left leg. The latter complaint sets are harder to explain by a known medical disease because it does not monitor the anatomical distribution of nerves. As a result, the diagnosis of conversion disorder can be considered.