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10 Rare Mental Disorders:
Their Symptoms and Treatment
Rare mental disorders affect an individual’s thoughts, mood, behavior, and overall mental health. Various factors, for instance, genetic predisposition, environmental factors, and life experiences can cause these conditions. However, some rare mental disorders still go undiagnosed.
In a 2019 World Health Organization (WHO) report, 970 million people suffer from mental disorders.. making mental health a leading cause of disability worldwide.
Among others, depression is the most common mental health disorder globally, affecting more than 264 million people.
Symptoms and Treatment of Rare Mental Disorders
1. Communication Disorders
One of the rare mental disorders is a communication disorder. These disorders affect a person’s capacity to use, comprehend, or recognize words. The DSM-5 distinguishes four types of communication disorders: Language impairment, speaking impediment, childhood fluency impairment, and social communication impairment.
Symptoms
Impaired Articulation:
Faltered speech or inability to form coherent words makes communication more difficult.
Fluency Dysfunction:
Conversing at an erratic pace or rhythmic pace.
Voice Disorder:
Speaking with an unnatural tone, volume, or length.
Treatment
Speech Therapy:
Speech therapy helps kids learn new vocabulary, arrange their ideas, and fix written and verbal grammatical or spelling mistakes.
Behavior Therapy:
Behavior therapy for children, more importantly, encourages the development of positive interpersonal skills while reducing unwanted behavioral issues. Moreover, children are encouraged to use mnemonic techniques to help them recall information quickly. For example, the names of the five lakes—Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior- are associated with the mnemonic HOMES.
Environmental Therapy:
These children require extra attention. Hence, giving them time during oral discussions helps them formulate more eligible responses.
2. Dissociative Identity Disorder
Dissociative Identity Disorder was once known as multiple identity disorder. It is one of the rare mental disorders, among others.
Symptoms
Symptoms include:
- This disorder is associated with having a set of alternate identities within one person. Each identity has its known characters, behaviors, and memories.
- The person inhabiting these personalities suffers from frequent memory gaps.
- Symptoms cause severe emotional and functional distress in people suffering from DID.
Dissociative identity disorder severely affects the person alongside those close to them. That’s because it might be tough to explain to someone what’s happening. Moreover, a person may stay in one personality for months before transitioning into another.
Treatment
Firstly, psychotherapy is typically the mainstay of treatment. People who receive therapy can better understand their conditions. Additionally, it can assist in identifying and integrating their split personalities.
Secondly, medication becomes an option. Many DID sufferers battle other mental illnesses like bipolar disorder, anxiety, or depression. Some antidepressants or antipsychotics may assist with the symptoms.
3. Depersonalization/DeRealization Disorders
DDD is one of the rare mental disorders that causes sufferers to experience an external sense of self. It may also involve the impression that nothing around them is real.
Symptoms
Typical signs include:
- Numbness to feelings or perceptions.
- Feeling like an outsider in one’s body.
- Distancing oneself from old memories or events.
- Having the impression that your limbs and torso are misshapen.
- Extreme sensitivity to your environment.
- Interpreting current occurrences as having occurred in the distant past.
- Experiencing the environment through a distorted perspective (two-dimensional, larger-than-life, colorless).
People with DDD are aware of their feelings, unlike those with psychotic disorders. The criteria for DDD meet by about 2% of individuals who have had a dissociative episode.
Treatment
Treatments help lessen and even eliminate some symptoms. Furthermore, when individuals address their underlying stressors, their chances of recovery increase. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) helps overcome obsessive thinking. Techniques for grounding individuals help them associate with reality.
Moreover, traumatic memories and awareness can benefit from EMDR, also known as eye movement desensitization and reprocessing.
4. Illness Anxiety Disorder
The hallmark of illness anxiety disorder is excessive worrying about having an unidentified medical disease. People who suffer from illness anxiety disorder worry excessively about being sick and are convinced they have or will develop severe disease. It is one of the rare mental disorders. It also results in behavioral issues like getting medical evaluations and treatments that could be dangerous to one’s health.
Symptoms
Symptoms include:
- Concerns about getting severely ill.
- Patients worry that minor symptoms or physical sensations indicate a severe illness.
- They receive no assurance from negative test findings.
- Extreme worry about genetic medical conditions.
- They get repeated examinations for symptoms of illness.
- A patient starts avoiding individuals, places, or actions out of fear of potential health risks.
- People who suffer from it bring up health and potential problems in every conversation.
Treatment
Cognitive behavioral therapy helps overcome health anxiety and orients the person towards daily routine tasks. Furthermore, oral antidepressants like selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors also help treat illness anxiety disorder.
5. Factitious Disorder
A person suffering from this disorder lies about being sick. They may also pose a child as ill. In mild cases, a person may exaggerate the symptoms. However, the person may inflict self-harm, mutilation, or tamper with medical records in severe cases. This disorder is the most painful mental illness.
Symptoms
Symptoms of factitious disorders include:
- Having excessive information about specific medical conditions.
- An apparent excitement for risky operations or processes.
- Experiencing ill-defined symptoms that deteriorate without a known cause.
- Having symptoms that do not improve after receiving medical care.
- Visiting numerous medical facilities or physicians.
- Intentional self-harm.
- Fabricating false medical reports and family histories.
- Not letting other family members speak with the practitioner.
Treatment
The factitious disorder results from past traumas, feelings of abandonment in childhood, or a weak sense of self-awareness. These disorders are rare mental disorders. Early diagnosis and treatment, however, are crucial in this disorder. This condition may pose a threat to the patient’s life. It is especially harmful if the patient is a child. Treatment includes counseling sessions that help change the patient’s thinking and behavioral patterns.
6. Rumination Disorder
Rumination disorder is diagnosed by regurgitating swallowed food. The intention of doing so is to take the food back in again or just throw up. Rumination is a common disorder in infants and children.
However, it is one of the rare mental disorders and can affect older teens and adults, especially people suffering from anxiety or depression.
Symptoms
Symptoms of rumination disorder include:
- Regurgitating food within 10 minutes of eating it.
- Abdominal pain that relieves upon regurgitation.
- Halitosis.
- Feeling of fullness.
- Nausea.
Treatment
There is no definite treatment for this condition. However, a behavioral psychologist may help in teaching diaphragmatic breathing. This technique helps in faster digestion of food. Rumination disorders are rare mental disorders.
7. Pica
Eating things that aren’t generally edible, for example, glue, soap, cement, clay, and cigarette ashes, is called pica syndrome. It can be the most painful mental illness as it causes severe lead poisoning.
While children are more likely to suffer from Pica, adults can also experience it. Sometimes, cravings associated with pica occur in pregnant women who are iron or zinc deficient.
Symptoms
Pica can cause health problems, including:
- Issues with the digestive system.
- Bloody stool.
- Poisoning by lead.
- Intestinal tearing and obstructions.
- Infections.
Treatment
Pica is a rare mental disorder. Although many kids, who have pica, gradually outgrow it, some patients require medical attention. Examining the underlying problems affecting these cravings or compulsions is crucial in treating pica.
According to Healthline, multivitamin therapy helps treat Pica. In most cases, the doctor treats the patient symptomatically first.
8. Kleptomania
It is one of the rare mental disorders. People with this disorder have an extreme urge to steal things. They suffer an extensive anxiety episode before stealing the object and a feeling of happiness and contentment afterward. The objects they may crave to steal do not have any significance or monetary value.
Symptoms
Symptoms of kleptomania include:
- Being unable to control strong impulses to steal things one doesn't need.
- Fear, tension, or anxiety before committing the theft.
- A joy, relief, or fulfillment while taking.
- Having guilt, regret, shame, or dread of being arrested following the theft.
- A recurrence of the kleptomania cycle and return of the impulses.
Treatment
Treatment for kleptomania involves psychotherapy and medications. Sometimes doctors recommend joining therapy groups. Other times, drugs like Naltrexone help lower the urge to steal in Kleptomania. Whereas SSRIs, which are antidepressants, are also effective. A patient might have to take a combination of medications to keep kleptomania under control.
9. Histrionic Personality Disorder
Having weak self-esteem is a symptom of histrionic personality disorder. People with this condition want to be the center of attention. They rely on other people for affirmation, self-worth, and acceptance. To gain attention, they frequently act irrationally or dramatically.
Symptoms
This condition is one of the rare mental disorders and is more common in women than in men. Typical signs include:
- Impulsive actions.
- Displaying an obvious discomfort when they’re not the focus.
- Appearing in front of a crowd frequently.
- A constant need for validation and assurance.
- Extreme attention to looks.
- Sexual conduct that is seductive and provocative.
- Self-centeredness.
- Making remarks about death or suicide attempts.
Treatment
Histrionic disorders are rare mental disorders. Treatment involves group therapy, behavioral therapy, and supportive therapy. A doctor may prescribe oral medications if he sees signs of OCD as well.
10. Inhalant-Use Disorder
Inhalant-use disorder characterized by an addictive disorder. In this disorder, a person gets constant urges to smell volatile substances. The petrol or paint fumes can cause severe nausea, vomiting, and dizziness.
In extreme cases may lead to a fainting spell or even death. This condition is one of the rarest mental disorders.
Symptoms
Symptoms include:
- Significant weight loss and decreased appetite.
- Slurred or incoherent speech.
- Bleeding from the nose.
- Ulcers around the mouth and nose.
- Confusion.
- Irritability.
- Poor concentration.
Treatment
Inhalant-use disorders are the rarest mental disorders. Medications aren’t required to treat this disorder. However, behavioral therapies and family therapies are the mainstays of the treatment. Activity and engagement programs also help in keeping the patient busy.