Functional Neurological Disorders (FNDs) in the media

This lady must have something organic and neurological going on to cause the dystonia in her hands and foot. Item is near the end, sorry forgot to note the time.

 

Sadly, dystonia and twisting of the feet is seen as a classic example of FND. I believed that after many ears of nothing to show my abnormal neurological signs would prove I was genuinely sick. How naive.

The tragedy of FND is that obviously physical signs of neurological disease is being classed as psychological.

 

Merged thread

FND: ‘The most common condition you’ve never heard of’ - BBC News

An 18-year-old woman has shared her experiences of living with the condition known as Functional Neurological Disorder (FND).

Cassie Hargreaves can have multiple seizures, each lasting up 20 minutes, every day.

She frequently suffers memory loss, which in some instances has led to her forgetting her own family.

Cassie, from West Yorkshire, said: "If I go out I'm afraid to go out and have a seizure or forget where I am, forget who I'm with."

According to the national charity FND Hope UK it's estimated that around 100,000 adults in the UK have the complaint.

Charity chairperson Cindy Smulders said: "The awareness is incredibly bad… it's the most common condition you've probably never heard of."

 

The very next video that comes up for me, after the one linked in the above post is this one :

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-dorset-47961996

The text for that one is more honest about what doctors think FND actually is (my bold) :

 

Why are they pretending like "FND" is a single condition?

 

So they can say 'it's the most common illness you've never heard of'.

 

They insist it is a single condition. Some studies have had a mix of people with seizures and IBS!

The different expressions of FND is because the brain uses things it has had experience of before. It is hard to tell exactly what they mean beyond "FND is all one disease caused by psychological processes not bodily dysfunction" though that is explaining it more than they do.

So someone in someone who once had diarrhoea the brain will remember that and express your distress (possibly what they mean) by giving you IBS or if you had a seizure as a child with a high fever the brain will use that.

All their findings from MRIs and other brain scans, their complicated explanations of, well lots of scientific language and numbers, are about the weaknesses in the brain that let you develop FND, maybe at a time of stress, they are vague. How it affects you beyond that is not relevant.

 

There is only one functional somatic syndrome

Simon Wessely and Peter D. White

https://www.cambridge.org/core/jour...tic-syndrome/4110CF970D44700E5CD43F4BCEFDE360

ME, IBS, chronic pain, literally all chronic illness is the same thing to these people. It's all conversion disorder, or whatever. Makes it all appear to be larger than it is.

 

Maybe just leave it there?

 

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/hospital-wards-are-filling-up-again-with-fakers
This article - which I think you can view without a subscription as a one-off - is written by a hospital doctor under a pseudonym.
It’s not a recommendation..........

 

That article is shocking in the attitude displayed by the author to patients, but sadly not remotely surprising. What does surprise me though is that apparently there is a part of the NHS I've never come across which will give people extensive investigations and long inpatient stays while the investigations are done.

I think one of my problems is that when I get gaslighted and dismissed I go away and stay away. I don't keep trying to get help over and over again, day after day and week after week. I'm too short of stamina both physically and mentally for that.

 

I truly fail to understand what the point of the Spectator article is, or why anyone would publish it. What is it supposed to accomplish?

On what planet, certainly not here in Britain, would a 'well-known malingerer' be 'receiving his tenth unnecessary CT scan'? Even getting one scan is super-difficult for those of us with real issues. And 'even obvious fakers ... achieved long admissions with extensive investigations because of the unwillingness of everyone to show them the door'. Really?? That's exactly the opposite of reality, certainly in the NHS. Is this author even a real doctor, or just some Rod Liddle type trotted out to insult everyone? Bizarre to say the least.

(Edited to add that it's the Spectator article I'm referring to)

 

This is why all the talks about parity between "health" and "mental health" (again who's separating?) are bunk. You can't reform that. Those beliefs are purely political and frankly absurd on their face. I don't know what goes through these people's head when they imply that their attention is worth something all on its own, or that lonely people will fake illness just to have the extremely unpleasant experience of a grumpy doctor's insults after spending several hours on an uncomfortable plastic seat in a noisy room built to be unpleasant precisely so as to push people away.

This belief is self-justified, that obviously you'd have to be crazy to go through all of this only to be insulted by the grumpy doctor who thinks you're an idiot and makes it very clear. So QED, those people are crazy. But they do want that attention. Somehow. It must be, otherwise it means medicine has screwed up on a scale that compares only to massive natural disasters or continental warfare. Which it has, but admitting to it is taboo and so on and on it goes.

I mean that you can't reform that in the exact same sense as some of the systemic racism you see in US police forces acting like animals, then acting offended, OFFENDED, that they can't just murder people in cold blood. This kind of problem has to be reformed entirely throughout the system, with immutable safeguards, individuals like this are completely beyond redemption and are likely to do more harm than good given their evident massive narcissism so it's a real puzzle why medicine keeps those bad apples that keep spoiling the whole bunch. The result of decades of spoilage is not a pretty sight.

 

An interesting thought. In fact reading the article as a physician it struck me that it would have to be a peculiarly bitter and twisted failure of a doctor to want to write this. If he was any good and had this sort of attitude to humanity why is he not making a million a year at JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs? What is he doing in a medical ward he hates working in because it deals with real people? The overall impression is of someone wanting to blame others for his own failure.

 

From that Spectator article:

10% of the entire NHS budget - isn't that right @dave30th ?

 

from the article

Since some of the early signs of cancer can easily be dismissed as subjective & the patient gets sent away, because drs with attitudes like his believe them to be 'objectively well' (it's happened to me & countless others i'm sure)..... I dont think he's got any business setting himself up as a person who can differentiate.

 

@JemPD

What does "objectively well" actually mean, I wonder? I'm guessing it means that unless the problem a patient has is visible they are deemed to be well, and therefore are assumed to be malingering if they turn up at A&E. But that attitude has been standard practice for years. It definitely isn't new, and it has nothing to do with Covid.