Conversion disorder: A rare psychiatric presentation, in a 15year old depressed female adolescent at the university of port harcourt teaching hospital, Nigeria

Conversion disorder is a condition in which patients present with neurological symptoms such as numbness, blindness, paralysis, or myoclonus and other movement disorders without a neurological cause, which arises in response to difficulties in the patient. Until recently, hysteria was believed to be uncommon amongst the indigenous inhabitants of tropical Africa. This article reports the first case of Conversion Disorders in an adolescent in UPTH and emphasizes the need for better clinical judgement to reduce the burden of missed diagnosis and also the impact of psychosocial stressors, harsh parenting, hostile home environment and high expressed emotion in the aetiology of the disorder and establishes a temporal relationship between the psychological stressors and the disorder which underscores its diagnostic and prognostic implications.