Definitions Flashcards
Resilience
Ability and capacity to secure resources needed to support well-being.
Aids people to recognize stressors and negative emotions, deal with them, and learn from the experience.
Milieu Management
The use of a living, learning, or working environment, including people, setting, structure, and emotional climate, to treat psychiatric patients.
Race vs Culture
Race is a socially constructed category of “difference” without biological meaning.
Culture is the shared beliefs, values, and practices of a group that shape members thinking and behaviour in patterned ways.
Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE)
Moderately to severely stressful experiences during the first 18 years of life.
Akathisia
Psychomotor restlessness as pacing or fidgeting.
Parkinsonism
Slowed movements, rigidity (stiffness), and tremors.
Tardive Dyskinesia
A persistent extrapyramidal side effect that consists of involuntary tonic muscular contractions that typically involve the tongue, fingers, toes, neck, trunk, or pelvis.
Pressured Speech
Rapid speech, which is typical of patients with manic disorder.
Poverty of Speech
Minimal responses, such as answering just “yes or no.”
Blocking
Sudden cessation of speech, often in the middle of a statement.
Flight of Ideas
Accelerated thoughts that jump from idea to idea, typical of mania.
Loosening of Associations
Illogical shifting between unrelated topics.
Tangeniality
Thought that wanders from the original point.
Circumstantiality
Unnecessary digression, which eventually reaches the point.
Echolalia
Echoing of words and phrases.
Neologisms
Invention of new words by the patient.
Clanging
Speech based on sound, such as rhyming and punning rather than logical connections.
Preservation
Repetition of phrases or words in the flow of speech.
Ideas of Reference
Interpreting unrelated events as having direct reference to the patient, such as believing that the television is talking specifically to them.
Delusions
Fixed, false beliefs, firmly held in spite of contradictory evidence.
Persecutory Delusions
False belief that others are trying to cause harm, or are spying with intent to cause harm.
Erotomanic Delusions
False belief that a person, usually of higher status, is in love with the patient.
Grandiose Delusions
False belief of an inflated sense of self-worth, power, knowledge, or wealth.
Somatic Delusions
False belief that the patient has a physical disorder or defect.
Illusions
Misinterpretations of reality.
Derealization
Feelings of unrealness involving the outer environment.
Depersonalization
Feelings of unrealness, such as if one is “outside” of the body and observing their own activities.
Suicidal and Homicidal Ideation
Suicidal and homicidal ideation requires further elaboration with comments about intent and planning.
- Presence of a Plan
- Means to carry out the plan
- Opportunity to carry out the plan
Hallucinations
False sensory perceptions, which may be auditory, visual, tactile, gustatory or olfactory.
Clouding of Consciousness
Reduced state of wakefulness with disturbance in perception and awareness.
Delirious
Bewildered, restless, confused (related to fear or hallucinations).
Stupor
Unresponsive to environment, but briefly rousable.
Insight
Ability of the patient to display an understanding of his current problems, and the ability to understand the implication of these problems.
Judgement
Ability to make sound decisions regarding everyday activities. Judgement is best evaluated by assessing a patient’s history of decision making, rather than by asking hypothetical questions.
Ethnocentrism
Assuming one’s own beliefs, values, and practices are the best, preferred, or only way.
Transference
Patient unconsciously displaces onto individual in current life emotions and behaviours from childhood that originated in relationships with significant others.
Countertransference
Nurse displaces feelings related to people in nurse’s past onto patient.
Serotonin
Major function is in mood, sleep, arousal, pain, & appetite (especially carbs, chocolate); provides mainly an inhibitory response.
Norepinephrine
Major function is in alertness, consciousness; causes changes in mood, attention and arousal, fight or flight; mostly excitatory neurotransmitter.
GABA
Major inhibitory neurotransmitter; produces calmness and relaxation; may play a role in pain perception; anti-convulsant and muscle-relaxing
properties, may impair cognition and psychomotor functioning.
Dopamine
Major function is in movement, learning, integration of emotions and thoughts, decision-making, comfort, alertness, attention, & satisfaction, and provides mainly an excitatory
response.
Glutamate
Excitatory transmitter, plays a role in learning and memory.
Extrapyramidal Side Effects (EPS)
- Parkinsonism - cogwheel rigidity, fine tremor, akinesia - loss of movement.
- Akathisia - motor restlessness, apprehension and irritability
- Dystonia - acute reaction, needs medical attention, exaggerated posturing of head, neck, or jaw/sudden muscle spasms in neck, back, or eyes that may be painful or frightening.
Neuroleptic Malignant Syndrome
Confusion, rigidity, fever, autonomic instability, increased WBC, delirium, catatonia.
Adventitious crisis
A state of imbalance that results from events not part of everyday life, such as a natural disaster, a national disaster, or the results of crime.
Maturational crisis
A critical period of increased vulnerability and heightened potential - a turning point.
Situational crisis
Acute imbalance that arises from events that are extraordinary, external rather than internal, and unanticipated.
Anhedonia
Inability to feel pleasure.
Anergia
Abnormal lack of energy.
Positive symptoms
“Positive” means something added to the personality that should not be there.
Negative symptoms
“Negative” means something taken away from the personality that should be there.
