Excessive time and energy devoted to these symptoms or health concerns.Persistently high level of anxiety about health or symptoms.Disproportionate and persistent thoughts about the seriousness of one’s symptoms.Excessive thoughts, feelings, or behaviors related to the somatic symptoms or associated health concerns as manifested by at least one of the following:.The essential requirement for the new diagnosis indeed the only. The newer diagnosis can be assigned even if there is an identifiable physical illness. This is essentially similar to DSM-IV’s somatization disorder with one critical difference. One or more somatic symptoms that are distressing or result in significant disruption of daily life. In DSM-5, this diagnosis was replaced by somatic symptom disorder.Symptoms of somatic symptom disorder as cataloged by the DSM-5:

Whether or not the physical complaints can be medically explained, their suffering is real and interferes with daily life. Individuals with somatic symptom disorder access medical care at high rates and such a level of medical care rarely improves their distress. Health concerns may become so extreme that they are a central feature of a person’s identity and dominate their relationships with others. For example, a person may have a surgical procedure with no complications, but their concern over physical sensations following the surgery could leave them impaired or disabled. They assume physical sensations in their bodies are threatening or harmful, and they often think the worst about their symptoms, regardless of any evidence to the contrary. People with somatic symptom disorder spend a great deal of time and energy experiencing high levels of worry about illness. Thus, appropriate diagnosis and careful management are required to mitigate the patient's distress. Patients with SSD often pursue excessive and unnecessary investigations, hospitalisations and treatments that significantly affect quality of life and drain healthcare resources. Somatic symptom disorder is characterized by the way people feel and behave in response to their physical sensations, not the sensations alone. Somatic symptom disorder (SSD) is characterised by a dysfunctional preoccupation with one or more physical symptoms. These symptoms can be specific (pain in a specific area) or more general (fatigue), and they may be normal bodily sensations or be the result of a medical condition. People with somatic symptom disorder have multiple physical symptoms that cause significant distress.

Somatic symptom disorder dsm 5