Sexual dysfunction or sexual malfunction refers to a difficulty experienced by an individual or a couple during any stage of a normal sexual activity, including desire, arousal or orgasm. To maximize the benefits of medications and behavioural techniques in the management of sexual dysfunction it is important to have a comprehensive approach to the problem, A [...]
Sexual fetishism, or erotic fetishism, is the sexual arousal a person receives from a physical object, or from a specific situation. The object or situation of interest is called the fetish, the person a fetishist who has a fetish for that object/situation. Sexual fetishism may be regarded, e.g. in psychiatric medicine, as a disorder of sexual preference or as an enhancing element to a [...]
Folie à deux is a psychiatric syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief are projected from one individual to another. The same syndrome shared by more than two people may be called folie à trois, folie à quatre, folie en famille or even folie à plusieurs (“madness of many”). Recent psychiatric classifications refer to the syndrome as shared psychotic disorder (DSM-IV) (297.3) and induced delusional disorder (F.24) in the ICD-10, [...]
A sleep disorder, or somnipathy, is a medical disorder of the sleep patterns of a person or animal. Some sleep disorders are serious enough to interfere with normal physical, mental and emotional functioning. A test commonly ordered for some sleep disorders is the polysomnography. Disruptions in sleep can be caused by a variety of issues, from teeth grinding (bruxism) to night [...]
Sleepwalking, also known as somnambulism, is a sleep disorder belonging to the parasomnia family. Sleepwalkers arise from the slow wave sleep stage in a state of low consciousness and perform activities that are usually performed during a state of full consciousness. These activities can be as benign as sitting up in bed, walking to the bathroom, and cleaning, or as hazardous as cooking, [...]
Somatization disorder (also Briquet’s disorder or, in antiquity, hysteria) is a psychiatric diagnosis applied to patients who persistently complain of varied physical symptoms that have no identifiable physical origin. The disorder must begin before the patient turns 30 years of age and could last for several years, resulting to either medical seeking behavior or significant [...]
In psychology, a somatoform disorder is a mental disorder characterized by physical symptoms that suggest physical illness or injury – symptoms that cannot be explained fully by a general medical condition, direct effect of a substance, or attributable to another mental disorder (e.g. panic disorder). The symptoms that result from a somatoform disorder are due to mental factors. In people who have [...]
Transvestic fetishism is having a sexual or erotic interest in cross-dressing. It differs from cross-dressing for entertainment or other purposes that do not involve sexual arousal and is categorized as a paraphilia in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. (Sexual arousal in response to donning sex-typical clothing is homeovestism.) Transvestic fetishism refers specifically to cross-dressing; sexual arousal in [...]
Trichotillomania is the compulsive urge to pull out one’s own hair leading to noticeable hair loss, distress, and social or functional impairment. It is often chronic and difficult to treat. Trichotillomania may be present in infants, but the peak age of onset is 9 to 13. It may be triggered by depression or stress. Due to [...]
Vaginismus, sometimes anglicized vaginism is the German name for a condition which affects a woman’s ability to engage in any form ofvaginal penetration, including sexual intercourse, insertion of tampons, and the penetration involved in gynecological examinations. This is the result of a reflex of the pubococcygeus muscle, which is sometimes referred to as the “PC muscle”. The reflex causes the [...]
In clinical psychology, voyeurism is the sexual interest in or practice of spying on people engaged in intimate behaviors, such as undressing, sexual activity, or other activity usually considered to be of a private nature. Voyeurism (from the French voyeur, “one who looks”) can take several forms, but its principal characteristic is that the voyeur does not normally relate directly with [...]
