YOU ARE NOT ALONE - A companion online community discussion board for The Mental Illness Happy Hour podcast with Paul Gilmartin

Hello. I just joined and was looking at all the subthreads of mental illnesses and didn't see one for my biggest, current issue. I've been diagnosed with Conversion Disorder which is one of the Somatic Symptom Disorders in the DSM-5. Some other disorders that are similar are Functional Neurological Disorder (FND) and Psychogenic Non-Epileptic Seizures (PNES). There's a school of thought that Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, and similar illnesses are closely related as well.

Can there be a forum about our mental illness and our physical body? I don't want to move too far away from the heart of what this show is about but there's a whole class of mental illness that is largely expressed physically. It's misunderstood, often times shit on by professionals, can be very disabling, highly resistant to medicinal intervention, and has a bad historical reputation.

Thanks so much!

Hi there!

New to the forum, and found this post almost instantly. I'm sorry to see this never got picked up elsewhere (if so please lemme know). I'll admit that I wasn't familiar with CD before reading this but it sounds starkly similar to one of my main reasons for being here, and seeking outside help, and I'm curious how your progress is coming.

I was also curious if you're at all familiar with TMS (Tension Myoneural/Myositis Syndrome), the works of Dr. John Sarno, etc. That's the Mind/Body syndrome I've been unofficially diagnosed with and am currently struggling with. It sounds like it may be a little more specific in a certain sense than CD..but at the same time it's not recognized by the DSM at all still, and I don't see it happening anytime soon. You're right, the medical community still painfully behind in the acceptance of emotional and psychological causes behind a lot of chronic pain issues. It gets me totally riled up to think about all the time and money and trust I wasted on people who refused to even look in that direction.

Happy to compare notes if this isn't familiar to you, and see how they 'compare' to each other and maybe what is helping. Having regular pain and realizing you have nothing structural to attribute it to is such a complex and upsetting thing to have to wrap your mind around, I still struggle with it..

I don't know about you but I wish every day that there was something I could point to and blame, rather than having to dig deep down within and root around all the muck and mire and repression. So yeah, I feel like I'm finally on the 'right' road finally after wasting years chasing cures through specialists, physical therapists, alternative healers, you name it. It just seems like a much more obviously long road to be on, which is scary. I'm grateful I found a therapist who understands how this works though, and have given up on approaching the problems as structural in basically every way.

Anyways, very nice to hear someone else here who can relate.

Hope this finds you if you're still around and hope you're doing well