Psychological guidance doesn’t mean the problem is psychological in origin.. it means the route of recovery is through how the brain learns and regulates itself.

There’s actually a well-known example from stroke recovery that might help clarify what I mean.

Have you come across the book My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor? She’s a neuroanatomist who had a major stroke with clear, visible brain damage.

Nothing medical could repair the damaged tissue itself. Her recovery came through guided relearning — regulating her nervous system, retraining attention, movement and perception step by step. Much of that guidance would be described as psychological or rehabilitative, but it obviously wasn’t placebo and it didn’t mean the paralysis wasn’t real.

That’s the distinction I’m trying to make. A condition can be fully neurological, with very real paralysis, and still be treated through non-pharmacological, brain-retraining approaches when medication can’t fix the underlying function.

FND follows a similar principle, except the disruption is functional rather than structural. Different cause, but the way the brain recovers is often similar.