Mental Disorders in Physical Complaints
"If problems cause headaches or if grief causes oneself to get an upset stomach"
What are mental disorders in physical complaints?
Body and psyche cannot be separated from each other. Many people with severe physical illnesses (e.g. cancer, heart attacks) also develop mental disorders (e.g. depression, anxiety). Here the medicine speaks of "mental disorders in physical complaints". But even in the other direction, psychological problems can sometimes show up as physical disorder. Often private or occupational problems ("stress") trigger a psychic reaction (e.g. worries, sadness, fatigue), which shows up in a physical symptom (e.g. back- or headache) when a predisposition is there. This large group of complaints is summarised in medicine under the term "somatoform disorders".
How do you recognize these disorders?
Typically, people with somatoform disorders complain about various physical ailments (e.g. pain) for which no clear body-medical cause can be found ("You have nothing."). Accordingly, body medicine cannot offer "proper" treatment. Those affected are often desperate and go to different doctors, mostly without success. This leads to a great suffering of those affected and a restriction in everyday life, work and private life.
How are these disorders treated?
Somatoform disorders are serious diseases that arise from a combination of psychological problems and physical preconditions. Therefore, a purely body medical approach is too short-sighted! In our clinic, according to the S3 guidelines recommendation for "non-specific, functional and somatoform body complaints", the promotion of a biopsychosocial understanding of health and disease is particularly intensively addressed. It deals with the treatment of underlying psychological problems as well as the learning of techniques for improving physical ailments (e.g. pain). There is no guarantee that during the course of the treatment you will be completely relieved of your body's discomfort, but through our therapy offers you can learn to actively influence the ailments and thus to develop more joy of living again. For example, you will learn different techniques to actively do something to alleviate the discomfort, or to let them step into the background. As a result, both an improvement in quality of life and functional ability are achieved as well as over-, under- and wrong care are avoided.
