See Somatization disorder and Conversion disorder.
We have tales of yogis and other "adepts" who could supposedly live much longer than the average life span for their times or who could self-cure disease, etc. While I don't take these stories at their miraculous face value, I do wonder if there might not be some kernel of truth in there somewhere -- perhaps certain patterns of thought can and do have an effect on aging, the immune system, etc. We do know that people who are happy or feel socially accepted by friends and loved ones have statistically significant increased odds of surviving deadly cancers and other serious diseases.
For years I've felt like I've casually observed a converse effect-- people who adopt a curmudgeonly "old" point of view in life often seem to have failing health. I have wondered which comes first. Could an "old" (in the negative sense) mentality actually age you?
But I wonder what the aging effect of our obsession with control is. In other words, would playful thoughts motivated by a desire for control still net those results? (if indeed you can even be playful and controlling at the same time)
Based on what I know about psychology, I doubt it. Motivations matter, and letting go and accepting things as they are is one of the most psychologically healthy things we are capable of doing. I doubt if any of those yogis who achieved long life (if indeed they did) did so intentionally for the purpose of achieving a long life. Instead, it was likely a by-product - as so many of the best things are.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_hysteria#Cat_Nuns_.28Fran...
>A convent of nuns began to meow like cats and others followed until all would meow together at a certain time for several hours together. This continued until the surrounding village called soldiers to threaten the nuns to stop their singing.
There's little that can be said about this particular case, because so few details are included - other than that it's no surprise that it co-occurred with DID, for discrete mental illnesses rarely exist in the wild. They almost always come in bunches.
Predisposing factors for somataform include alexithymia and childhood trauma (1b) and it often co-occurs with anxiety and/or depression. Alexithymia (a little known condition involving a severe deficit in awareness of emotion and the body, and a focus on the external world) is usually a key factor in the etiology of the disease.
"Individuals with alexithymia tend to demonstrate an impoverished fantasy life and limited imagination, a diminished capacity for empathy, a penchant for impulsive behavior, and a propensity to experience emotions somatically" (2). The deficit in emotional processing is usually (at least originally) the result of a conscious effort to suppress/distract from unpleasant emotions (like this lady's trauma), which then express themselves in the body. Indeed, alexithymia-like symptoms are a common feature in a number of common mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety and panic disorder (3), and the more alexithyia-like characteristics these patients have, the worse their somatic symptoms (4).
Treatment of the disease is difficult because despite its psychological etiology, patients usually present well and emphatically deny that their psychology has anything to do with their symptoms (5). Interestingly, emerging findings on it tend to revolve around some of Freud's original ideas (6).
(1a) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2235919/
(1b) http://jnnp.bmj.com/content/early/2014/03/07/jnnp-2013-30720... and http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022399913...
(2) http://journals.lww.com/hrpjournal/Fulltext/2014/05000/Chang...
(3) http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11126-012-9246-y and http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810009...
(4) https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Schoevers/public... and http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010440X14...
(5) http://www.omicsonline.org/open-access/do-patients-with-soma...
(6) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3744921/ and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4396134/ and http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0149763415...