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After experiencing months of debilitating brain fog, seizures and muscle weakness, there is perhaps little more frustrating a response a doctor can give you than “It’s all in your head.”
But for the millions of people with functional neurological disorder – a condition that’s also been called hysteria, conversion disorder and psychogenic or psychosomatic illness – skepticism and bewilderment from clinicians is itself symptomatic of the condition.
“Patients often become the ball in a game of medical ping-pong,” writes Mackenzi Moore of the University of Colorado Anschutz. She serves as a program manager at one of the few multidisciplinary clinics for functional neurological disorder. “Psychiatry refers them to neurology because the symptoms appear neurological. Neurology refers them back to psychiatry because their scans are normal.”
However, thanks to advances in neuroscience, Moore explains how patients and doctors may finally be getting closer to the answers they seek – both in understanding how this disorder develops and ways to effectively treat it.
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