Functional disorders are probably associated with psychosocial stress because they're unexplained

Being sick with an illness that

• is difficult or even devastating
  
• is not understood by society, and therefore often misunderstood as some form of bad behavior or character flaw
• does not have treatments
  
• has uncertain prognosis
• with little prospects of improvement in the future

will cause psychosocial stress. The same illness, if it was well understood and accepted by society, would be a much less stressful event for the patient.

But certain people who don't seem to have much understanding of human psychology have difficulties understanding this simple concept, and instead believe that one must evoke some mysterious psychosomatic process to explain why psychosocial stress and significant unexplained illness occur together.

They also seem to struggle understanding the idea that illness does not begin with a diagnosis. Psychosocial stress that precedes a diagnosis can't be taken as reliable evidence that the stress caused the illness.

 

Yes I agree and think this every time I read something like "MUS highly associated with psychological distress" and the authors make different causal links to the ones you've just outlined. More gaslighting.

 

People have also associated psychological issues with the positions of the planets (or bumps on their heads) for the same reasons: that the issues lack a clear cause, and there's no way to prove that any theory--no matter how nonsensical--is false. A lot of psychology appears no more evidence-based than astrology.

 

And it must be said that although in recent decades this has largely fallen out of fashion with smart people, it doesn't take going too many decades further back to find ideas like this extremely fashionable throughout the whole population, including in very smart people, even commonly applied to medicine.

And frankly, it's a testament to how strong those beliefs are, that although the medical profession does not apply them currently anymore, it still retained the legacy of those days, and this is largely what psychosomatic medicine is made out of. The stories may have been lost, but belief in psychosomatic illness, at least to the degree it is today, is pretty much the same as the old days where many MDs were applying various beliefs like astrology in their craft.

Myths became traditions became standards. The standards do not exist without the myths. They are made out of the shadows of those myths. It may feel smarter to follow standards made from myths, but this is where the difference between intelligence and wisdom lies.