Content warning: all manner of stress!
This is part two in a series. Press here for part one.
It's been a rough day and you're coming home from work. The phone call you just had didn't help either. You can feel it coming. All your muscles are tense and feel like they can burst at any second. All you hope for is that you just can make it through your front door before it happens, but walking is slow. After almost falling over a few times and using all manner of things as support you finally get inside and close your door and breathe a brief sigh of relief. You at least made it home.
You start trying to take off your jacket, but your arms seem to have their own ideas. Realising that any attempt at taking your clothes off is hopeless you instead focus on trying to sit down, before suddenly feel you self moving towards the wall beside you, hitting it harder than you hoped for. All of your body is now screaming inside and you are flown to the floor, knocking the air out of you. Your body has started writhing, your limbs twisting into bizarre shapes. All of it painful. And you can do nothing.
For half an hour you're down there on your hallway floor, trying to collect your thoughs as your whole body aches and moves in strange ways. I'm not in danger, you think to yourself. I might have a few bruises later, but this can't seriously hurt me. It's true, but a cold comfort. When things settle down you lie still for a minute, taking deep breaths. You still hurt, but not as bad as before. Sweat runs down your neck and you discover that you're drenched in it, so you decide to get up and undress. Drained of energy, you wont get much done tonight, you know that much. Things always feel strangely anti-climactic and awkward afterwards. You have no idea what should happen, but now things are just back to normal. Time to get on with the evening then.
The above story is an attempt at showing a non-epileptic sezuire. It's of course not an exhaustive explaination. Everyone experience it differently and in different situations. Welcome to part two of my little text on conversion disorder!
You might have seen conversion disorder more than you know. As I wrote before, it's more common than you think. You might even recognise some of your own experiences in this. That time you were really stressed, maybe even burnt out, didn't you feel some of this? If not, I'm happy for you. Functional symtoms are not uncommon when dealing with stress. To be clear, it's also common to not experience these symptoms.
They're not all conversion disorder though. For that it has to be something close to the body's standard reaction to stress, which can be rather annoying. But you might have seen it in other places as well, such as in the form of a thing called shell shock. It's a part of any war, but it was seen to a great extent during and after World War 1, with many soldiers reacting strangely to primarily artillery barrages. Taking cover in trenches with bombs landing all round they could be hit any second and all they could do is stay put and hope they wont get hit. This could go on for hours. Even when safe they could stare into the distance for long periods of time, become very irritable, have trouble sleeping, having trouble walking, experience unwanted tremors and movements and things like that. Now, some of that is what we today would call post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but some of it is conversion disorder. It can even be seen in the miniseries Band of Brothers set during World War 2. In the third episode we get to follow a soldier who during a battle a suddenly becomes blind without sustaining any injury. The medic diagnoses it as hysterical blindness, which sound eerily like something we've talked about. And hey, if you have any more potential pop cultural and historical depictions, please let me know!
You might be wondering now how you even get this. Or perhaps you have a good guess after the last paragraph. The cause is always some form of distress or trauma. It can be combat, sexual, harassment, physical injury or basically anything that can cause a large amount of stress. And while the precise workings of this are still unknown (at least to me at the time of writing, and I'm not a professional. I'm a patient) we do know that adrenaline and the fight/flight/freeze response plays a major part in this. So when we who suffer from this experience an episode, attack or what ever you want to call it, we get a huge boost of adrenaline that messes up how our brain functions. So to be clear: this is not something the patient is making up. This is a bug in how humans are programmed.
In my case I got conversion disorder when I was around twenty years old. Up until that time I had lived with Asperger's syndrome, depression and social anxiety my whole life without knowing (fun fact: I got all four diagnoses at the same), leaving me a very stressed individual, very keen on fitting in and working my ass off to ”make it”. I burned out and kept going anyway, not listening to my body's signals at all until my body quite literally made me unable to do anything.
But after first hearing that the problem was that I have short muscles (I don't), then that I probably have multiple sclerosis (that was a fun day), and being tested for all kinds of neurological disorders (needles in spines can be uncomfortable) the neurologists settled on saying ”bye!” and I just lucked out (or ”lucked in”, depending on where you live in the world) in getting the diagnosis from somewhere else and met a doctor in a third place that just happened to be specialiced in fuctional disorders. From her I could understand a bit of what was going on with me.
It's not all doom and gloom though. The absolute majority of people who get a diagnosis and treatment become healthy again in just a few weeks. So that's great! But yeah, I'm not one of them. All cases could potentially get cured, but a few things are needed for that (just to give you an idea. Don't use this list as treatment):
Recognise the severity of the issue and that the patient is not making this up. Could be done with decency and just listening.
Get to the source of the stress. Recognise what triggers the symptoms. Might require some form of deep psychology, such as psychodynamic therapy.
Work out new and more healthy reactions to the triggers. Might require something like cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to adjust unconscious behaivours.
This is simplified, of course, maybe to the point of being incorrect for some patients. But one problem with this is that deep psychology is often frowned upon by healthcare today, mainly just because CBT is more effective, and therefor cheaper per patient and better for the general mental health of society. But CBT can't do everything deep psychological therapies can do, leaving many people behind. So number 2 in the steps above can become really hard to achieve if you're not willing to pay for it yourself (it's not cheap). I've even had the public health care tell me this, that they can't offer me this treatment (like they could not many years ago).
How I spend my time is learning to do things without it causing too much stress, trying to dig into my own brain (figuratively, ahem) to find out the precise triggers of my symptoms, and sometimes still pushing myself too hard in an effort to do fun things or have a job. I've made a lot of progress (and my wife has been extremely helpful in this), but there's still a lot of bad thoughts and habits to unravel in order to understand how I work and find the exact cause of this.
So to sum up: many people experience functional symptoms some time in their lives. A few people even have conversion disorder where your brain is convinced these functional symptoms are good, standard reactions to stress. Living with it is very disabling. And, well, I have conversion disorder and I've had it for over ten years now. And most importantly, now you know what it is! That's mission succesful for me.
So take care of yourselves and of each other. Stress is much more harmful than people realize.
Love you
Bye!
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