In psychogenic pain disorder the main feature is a persistent complaint of pain in the absence of organic disease and with evidence of a psychological cause.
The identification of cortical subcortical neuroimaging features that differentiate organic from psychogenic dystonia complements studies on plasticity in dystonia.
I decided that one day I would make a feature film about a mass psychogenic outbreak set in a girls' school.
But before making the feature, I began to explore the history of mass psychogenic illnesses in a 2006 short film entitled Madness of the Dance, featuring Maxine Peake as a psychology professor, which was about a series of dancing manias in Europe between the 13th and 17th centuries involving hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people dancing in strange ways.
Intriguingly, psychogenic seizures seem to have been much rarer in Britain and did not feature prominently in any previous or subsequent war [ 18].
The features that distinguish tics from other movement disorders with the exception of akathisia and psychogenic movement disorders are (1) the ability to suppress them for a while, and (2) the patient's experience of tics as a (partly) voluntary movement to relieve an inner tension or a premonitory focal sensory sensation [ 77].
However, parkinsonism is also a prominent feature in, for example, progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP), multiple system atrophy (MSA), psychogenic parkinsonism, dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB), vascular parkinsonism, and drug-induced parkinsonism.
In the 10 years since I first sought out Simon Wessley, I have filled up my own box file on mass psychogenic illness and I realise what kept me so committed to making the dreamed-about feature film that eventually became The Falling.
Bourne is eventually diagnosed with psychogenic amnesia.
"There is a psychogenic aspect to this," he said.
