How Can Somatoform Disorders Be Told Apart?
Somatoform disorders are alike in that they each involve physical symptoms without evidence of physical disease. The symptoms stem from an emotional cause. To understand how the disorders differ from each other, consider three young people in a doctor’s waiting room who are all having trouble with their voices. Tommy, a teenager, was only hoarse, but he feared this meant that he was getting throat cancer. Nine-year-old Mary had suddenly lost her voice completely and could not speak. Lilian, who was 25, was also hoarse and coughing, but she had many other symptoms, including dizziness and a stomachache. As it turned out, Tommy was suffering not from cancer but from hypochondria. He had been much too worried about his hoarseness, which had come from cheering for his high school football team. The doctor could find nothing wrong with Mary’s larynx, or voice box. Her mother said that Mary had been punished severely for “talking back,” and the doctor suspected that she had lost her voice be
