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Psychiatric diagnoses, self-reports of symptoms, and illness behavior of 20 fibromyalgia patients and 23 rheumatoid arthritis patients were compared. The fibromyalgia patients were not significantly more likely than the arthritis patients to report depressive symptoms or to receive a lifetime psychiatric diagnosis of major depression. These results do not support the contention that fibromyalgia is a form of somatized depression. Fibromyalgia patients, however, reported significantly more somatic symptoms of obscure origin and exhibited a pattern of reporting more somatic symptoms, multiple surgical procedures, and help seeking that may reflect a process of somatization rather than a discrete psychiatric disorder.
Kirmayer et al. (Mon,) studied this question.