Question

What is the hypothesized role of anxiety in the dissociative and somatic symptom disorders?

Answer 1

Dissociative Disorder is characterized by disruption or disturbance in awareness, memory or identity. People use dissociation as a defense mechanism to defend against traumatic event or experience. It is beleived when people become overwhelmed by the stress or anxiety of the situation they develop an altered state of consciousness which leads them to get detached from reality of the specific situation. It saves them from facing the anxiety of the situation by making them forget. Anxiety from the past experience causes fear or phobia of the situation. This causes them to shutdown the next time they encounter it. Anxiety here might be learned through conditioning leading to possiblity of stimulus generalization (one event leading to fear of all similar events).

Somatic Symptom Disorders (SSD) is characterized by complaints of physiological pains and symptoms that are psychological in origin. The pain and problems here are real but no evidence can be found during medical checkup. The main reason behind this disorder is anxiety. Some people become oversensitive when they keep thinking that they might be getting sick or are going to come down with a threatening disease. This anxiety causes them to feel sick. Too much anxiety of any situation affects body in negative way, even for normal people. How this happens is not known as the relationship between mind and body is very complex. Anxiety of falling sick causes changes in body that somatizes the symptoms an pain. SSD is common in females, and in individuals who might have been involved in sexual abuse or who do substance abuse.