Dr. David Perez

Great place to start.

One of the classic metaphors is this notion that the hardware is healthy, but the software is crashing.

Another metaphor is this notion of brain-mind-body overload.

that maybe at times when our brain circuits and our bodies reach certain thresholds of its capacity, that brain circuits become a bit scrambled and glitchy.

When I talk to people about this, I'll highlight, is FND a neurologic condition?

Yes.

Is FND a psychiatric condition?

Yes.

Is FND a psychological condition?

Yes.

Wow, all of the above.

But very importantly, yes.

Each of those statements by itself in isolation is incomplete.

We try to put various diagnoses in buckets.

But what do you do when a given condition kind of violates those traditional conceptualizations of what a neurologic condition is and what a psychiatric condition is?

And what's also critical is this lens of physical health meets mental health.

of eroding these boundaries, this is something that's critical for many, many conditions.

I just think FND is so striking in how it challenges this artificial dualism that we have in medicine and society that really doesn't serve our patients well and frankly doesn't serve science and clinical practice well either.

You can imagine with the hardware-software analogy, there are many ways to crash the system that at the end of the day might lead to an alert in your computer, right?

We can sort of think about functional neurological disorder being a final common pathway of a glitchy brain.