ABSTRACT
As a mental health nurse in the community, I worked with a depressed young man whose body seemed to communicate something about him. He complained almost constantly of flu symptoms. His legs, he told me, felt like dead weights. Sometimes they felt so rooted to the ground that he felt he couldn’t walk. He had a sense that his body was being dragged backwards, and he was full of aches and pains. When this man began to feel better through receiving psychological interventions where he began to speak in great detail about his painful relationship with both his parents, these symptoms gradually disappeared. He described how he felt his parents were always trying to hold him back and would not let him move forward in his life. It was as if his mind was using his body to tell the story of his experiences. Physical symptoms like these, which have no apparent medical cause, are generally referred to as conversion symptoms, or, less commonly, as ‘hysteria’. The person presenting them often denies that there is any psychological connection to them.
