by Tony Narloch

Created on: June 16, 2009   Last Updated: June 18, 2009

One of the most troubling and frustrating aspects of Somatoform disorder (also known as Briquet's syndrome) is that the sufferer has to endure physical maladies and symptoms that would indicate that there is some sort of physiological fault even where a diagnosis shows that there is no underlying physical cause. There Briquet's syndrome is an extremly controversial diagnosis, some medical professionals consider it a disorder and health complaint in of itself, whilst others regard it rather skeptically as attempting to quantify the unquantifiable. Patients themselves for their part have criticised the medical profession for the coining of this phrase, as it seems only to be diagnosed whenever a battery of expensive tests are conducted and exhausted!

The problem with Briquet syndrome is that it has no universal symptoms, the sufferer will suffer from a variety of different symptoms including nausea, dizziness, vertigo, back pain, muscular pain, joint pain, tiredness, extreme fatigue, mood swings among many others. The only truly universal component of Briquet syndrome is that it is diagnosiable when there is no physiological causes for the symptoms that are manifesting themselves.

People who suffer from Briquet syndrome face a great deal of stigma, as all too often there is a tendency to associate it with the likes of Munchausen syndrome (a mental disorder whereby a person induces illness or self-harm in order to obtain medical assistance and by extension, attention.) or general malingering. Often regarded as the "trickster's ache", Briquet syndrome is a bizzare health condition in that the symptoms endured by the patient are entirely real to them, meaning that they do indeed feel nauseous, vomit on a regular basis, suffer from regular headaches etc. The fact that there is no underlying physiological problem to explain such issues invariably results in them becoming more agitated, not less so.

Briquet syndrome is now a genuinely accepted, recognized and diagnosed mental disorder as per the American Psychiatric Association, which has identified several variations of the disorder:

Conversion disorder: This is whereby the sufferer present neurological symptoms even though there is no underlying neurological malfunction or problem. This can range from numbness in limbs, fits, blackouts or even paralysis where this is either partial or total. This is without a doubt, the most controversial of the different forms of Briquet syndrome because the mental health profession is extremely polarised as to whether it still exists or not.

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