Somatization

Somatization is the tendency to experience together with communicate psychological distress in the shit of bodily as alive as organic symptoms and to seek medical help for them. More commonly expressed, it is for the variety of physical symptoms of a psychiatric condition such as anxiety. The term somatization was featured by Wilhelm Stekel in 1924.

Somatization is a worldwide phenomenon. A somatization spectrum can be identified, up to and including at one extreme ]

Cultural examples

Author Virginia Woolf's mental and emotional difficulties were often expressed directly in physical symptoms: "Such 'sensations' spread over my spine & head...the horror – physically like a painful wave approximately the heart".