019 Life events in the year preceding the onset of conversion disorder: the role of the type and timing of events

Abstract

Classical models of Conversion Disorder (CD) hypothesise that specific stressful experiences are “converted” into symptoms to relieve psychological pressure, and would suggest those experiences should be of a nature that allowed the “escape” from an unwelcome situation and would also tend to be underreported by patients. We sought to compare the frequency of severe life events preceding illness onset in a series of CD patients with those occurring in a healthy control group, and to characterise the nature of those events in two dimensions: “escape” and “underreporting”. In this prospective study we use the Life Events and Difficulties Schedule (LEDS) to look for adverse life events in the ye..