Sorry - busy day. Just back to respond to the 'side thread' questions about non-organic disorders.
Smilla I'm pretty sure we were just taught a functional disorder is quite explicitly not the same as a psychosomatic disorder.
That's a slightly out of date way of looking at it - and the term 'psychosomatic' is to be avoided. Even 'conversion disorder' is becoming unpopular among those who are the experts in the field of physical disorders with no identifiable organic basis. Clinicians are being encouraged to refer to all disorders with a non-organic basis as 'functional' because, well, that's what they are. A disorder of function, if not necessarily structure. Patients are far more accepting of that term, and are therefore far more amenable to the most appropriate treatment. There are many more 'acceptable' functional disorders, like IBS, that would never have been classed as a 'conversion disorder, but that you cannot deny respond well to psychological therapies. Fibromyalgia being the best example.
duplodon it is pretty dangerous for a GP to proceed on the basis that something is a conversion disorder based on short consultations, no?
Depends how well the GP knows the patient, doesn't it? And how conclusive the tests that have been done are. It's pretty dangerous for a GP to order up a massive pile of invasive tests if there is nothing there to be found, and is only going to reinforce the belief that 'there is something terribly wrong with me, my GP is crap and no one is doing anything to help me'. It's a massive reason why there is such a lot of GP-hopping among patients with functional disorders. The better the GP gets to know them, the more the tests start dwindling as it becomes obvious that the cause of their problems is psychological and (99.99% of the time) social.
I had an adult neuro client once whose stammer was judged by GP as conversion disorder. He was bloody lucky that didn't kill him.
Yes, that was fortunate, but he obviously still got referred on for the appropriate tests that got him diagnosed properly. Consider conversely, however, the patients with a functional disorder who are misdiagnosed with an unspecified physical problem. They have years, and years, and years of dangerous, ineffective treatments (there is an alarmingly high rate of unnecessary surgery among patients with functional disorders, especially hysterectomies) GP hopping as mentioned above, repeat hospital admissions, invasive tests and drug trials costing the NHS millions...yet it's the patients who get a physical diagnosis after they were, in their words, 'told it's all in my head' that we reserve sympathy for. Physical problems are considered, at every conceivable level, even covertly, to be so much worse than psychiatric ones, when that's so very much not the case.
Conversion disorder symptoms are usually defined as being short lived, too, aren't they? Recurrent but short lived.
Most definitely not! Functional disorder symptoms can roll on for years and, in the majority of cases, for a lifetime. Cure rates are something like 30-50%. You have a better chance with many forms of cancer. Symptoms are wildly inconsistent to the objective observer, yes, but for the patient, they are continuous and drag on for years. You can pick the functional patients just by looking at the trolley of medical notes on a ward - they're thick as War and Peace and up to Volume 5. It's malingerers who have short-lived non-organic problems - they deliberately put on symptoms until they get what they want (or get caught out) then beat a hasty and permanent retreat before they get into trouble.
Sorry OP 
Pet subject of mine. I do hope your friend gets the correct treatment soon.