Psychogenic Voice Disorders Literature Review, Personal Experiences with Opera Singers and Case Report of Psychogenic Dysphonia in Opera Singer

Abstract

The point of this article is to make a diagnosis of psychological voice disorders easier by reviewing germane to the subject literature. Current view on terminology, classification, clinical manifestation and underlying psychological background of this rare condition is given. Secondly our aim is to asses prevalence ratio of psychological voice disorders in a group of 1520 professional opera singers-people with the most challenging voice effort among professional voice users. Our findings contradict common belief of high occurrence rate of this disorder among opera singers.