Psychosomatic Anxiety Disorder!

[CookieCat]

I'm a Hypochondraic but also suffer from Psychosomatic Anxiety Disorder and was wondering if anyone else here had been diagnosed with PAD.

With PAD you see an illness on TV say for example, a blood clot in the leg. With PAD you start to believe you have that blood clot in your leg and begin to feel really bad pains almost to the point of finding it difficult to walk.

Same with worrying about brain tumours and then getting really bad headaches and thinking your sight is being affected, worry about your heart then feeling palpitations. It's awful. I was just wondering if any of you had experience this. It just goes to show how powerful our minds are.

[worrywart29]

I'm the same exact way. I never been diagnosed didn't even know there was a name for it but yup that's me all the way.

[Miche31]

Yes I am this way too

[MyNameIsTerry]

I'm the same exact way. I never been diagnosed didn't even know there was a name for it but yup that's me all the way.

The problem can be that there are 2 major diagnostic manuals used to diagnose:

1 - WHO ICD (currently ICD-10) which is used in Europe. We use this in the UK.

2 - The DSM (currently DSM-V) which is a US manual and is used around the world.

Both of these classify HA (which isn't a term used in either, illness anxiety disorder is in the DSM-V I believe) in different ways so a resident of the UK can be diagnosed with a disorder that has a different name in the other manual or can be diagnosed with a different disorder due to the differing criterias. For instance, the DSM-V looks for existing anxiety disorders that could explain Hypochondria yet the ICD-10 doesn't when making the diagnosis of Hypochondrial Disorder (ICD-10 does with a couple of the Somatoform Disorders where it looks for GAD).

Complicated, eh? :ohmy:

---------- Post added at 07:19 ---------- Previous post was at 07:10 ----------


I'm a Hypochondraic but also suffer from Psychosomatic Anxiety Disorder and was wondering if anyone else here had been diagnosed with PAD.

With PAD you see an illness on TV say for example, a blood clot in the leg. With PAD you start to believe you have that blood clot in your leg and begin to feel really bad pains almost to the point of finding it difficult to walk.

Same with worrying about brain tumours and then getting really bad headaches and thinking your sight is being affected, worry about your heart then feeling palpitations. It's awful. I was just wondering if any of you had experience this. It just goes to show how powerful our minds are.

There are people on here that say this, I know I've read threads about it in the past. There is even a form of OCD with a similiar trigger where it is believed that you can be contaminated by others, Emotional Contamination.

The Psychosomatic term seems to have been replaced with Somatoform in the latest diagnostic manual we use in the UK. Not sure why, maybe they decided a fresh slate was needed due to the stigma attached to the old term?

The latest manual doesn't include the issue of suggestability though. I haven't read ICD-9 to see this not being transferred to ICD-10 (there is a coding database that shows where each data item gets transferred) but I can see that several Psychosomatic forms now link to Somatoform versions e.g. Unspecified Psychophysiological or Psychosomatic Disorder, Undifferentiated Psychosomatic Disorder, Multiple Psychosomatic Disorder, etc. They did change some of those names further.

If you want a read of the ICD-10, I can post a link and tell you which codes to search for and then it will take you to the full text for the category they all fit under.