Hi I'm back with another question: Can psychological trauma cause fever? The thing is, if a girl got a psychological shock "because she was forced to watch her best friend get killed before her eyes" will she have a fever "with all the shaking and delirium things" after 8-10 hours of the accident? I read some about psychological trauma and it's symptoms but I couldn't find anything related to the fever and delirium except if the one would have nightmares about the cause of trauma. So I appreciate any help you can offer. Thanks.
She could be delirious with fear - that wouldn't necessarily mean she had a fever. Shock usually causes shivering, but that doesn't necessarily mean a fever either. Panic and panic attacks can cause shaking and sweating which, I suppose could be mistaken for a fever, but fever does suggest a temperature rise brought on by illness rather than anything else. I should image the trauma would cause: panic attacks, night terrors, which are accompanied by sweating, nausea. Check Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome - that may give you more info.
It's called psychogenic fever or psychogenic hyperthermia. Try searching PubMed, advanced search for psychogenic and fever. Here's an example of what I found with that search: Pyrogenic cytokines did not mediate a stress interview-induced hyperthermic response in a patient with psychogenic fever: a case report. It made me curious about what kind of questions are in a "stress interview".
Re "shaking and delirium things", you need to be more specific. Are you talking about fever and chills kind of shaking, or are you talking about something like drug withdrawal "shakes" that can sometimes include delirium? People can hallucinate and be confused when they have fever between 103 F (39.4 C) and 106 F (41.1 C). Over 106 F, you are risking death.
did i see this post on absolutewrite? traitor.... LOL This page is quite detailed with tons of symptons, side effects etc but nothing about a fever http://www.healingresources.info/emotional_trauma_overview.htm
not very likely... if it's been documented i have to assume it's very rare... why must she have a fever and delerium?... it'll make little to no sense to readers, so i'd advise you to stick to the more common aftereffects of an emotional trauma...
Thanks for the link And yes, I posted the same question there too because I need as many opinions & info as I can get, so...
I'm talking about fever and chills kind of shaking, the thing that happens with high fever. I just want to make sure if the fever after emotional trauma is medically reliable.
I almost said, it didn't occur, then stopped myself and decided to check. In 35+ years in medicine/nursing, I've never heard of it. I did have a patient once, totally 'mind blowing', who went into a catatonic state because of stress. I never would have believed such a thing could happen to a person with no history of psych problems (and not related to drugs or sleep deprivation) had I not seen it myself. I knew this woman for a while before the breakdown and I watched her deteriorate from normal worry to paranoia to catatonia over the course of a couple of days. A stress induced fever might be too rare to serve as a good element in a story unless the fever has some other role to play in the plot. Stress induced delirium doesn't need to include a fever. But if you can work the term, psychogenic fever, into the script, I think the readers will get it.
I've visited a number of trauma seminars with really experienced teachers who have worked with people suffering severe trauma, e.g. after mass accidents, plane crashes, house fires etc. and fever has never been a topic. Tremors and dissociation though are regular symptoms of intensive trauma, and while delirium and dissociation are two different things, they have a lot of overlapping symptoms and are hard to distinguish. The shaking after trauma is usually caused by the body's reaction to the spikes in hormone levels, with neuro transmitters like dopamine, serotonine or endorphines clogging up the receptors and garbling nerve signals, the same mechanisms being at work as in drug withdrawal. The symptoms are usually more pronounced under continued external stress, so I could imagine that, in extreme circumstances, high fever might be a physiological reaction to the body's inability to cope with extreme fluctuations in hormone level.
I've learned from experience, shooting from the hip only hits the target some of the time. Age distribution and gender differences in psychogenic fever patients. There's a free link to the full study which adds: Who knew?
I think you did hit though. That study sounds rather esoteric to me, and I found no source outside Japan to back up even the existence of that "psychogenic fever".
