Definitions

Question 1

What is Dysthymia?

Answer 1

A chronic state of low mood, usually with an insidious onset and lasting at least two years.

Question 2

What is Euthymia?

Answer 2

Happy, contented mood

Question 3

What is Mood?

Answer 3

A word used to describe sustained and pervasive emotion.

Question 4

What is Affect?

Answer 4

Short lived observable pattern of behaviour that expresses the subjective emotional state of an individual. It is subject to variation over brief periods of time.

Question 5

What is Alexithymia?

Answer 5

An inability to verbally express one’s emotions

Question 6

What is Anhedonia?

Answer 6

An inability to enjoy things that you previously enjoyed and a lack of ability to experience pleasure.

Question 7

What is psychomotor retardation?

Answer 7

The subject sits abnormally still or walks abnormally slowly or takes a long time to initiate movement.

Question 8

What is ‘flight of ideas’?

Answer 8

This is an extreme example of thought disorder where thought come really quickly. There is relative logical progression to the thoughts however.

Question 9

What is ‘pressure of speech’?

Answer 9

The subject talks too much. There seems to be undue pressure to get the words out. He speaks too fast, his voice is too loud and unnecessary words are added.

Question 10

What is depersonalisation?

Answer 10

A peculiar change in the awareness of self, in which the individual feels as if he/she is unreal. (outside of your body watching yourself)

Question 11

What is derealisation?

Answer 11

The subject experiences his surroundings as unreal. An office or bus or a street seems like a stage set with actors, rather then real people going about their business. Everything seems colourless artificial and dead. The subject retains a measure of understanding and knows the condition is abnormal.

Question 12

What is an illusion?

Answer 12

It is a false perception of a REAL STIMULUS. (VISUAL)..very common/ misinterpretation of a real stimulus.

Question 13

Name and describe the three types of illusions?

Answer 13

Affect illusions-here the person’s emotional state leads to misperceptions like when your scared and you see a shadow of a man.
Completion illusions- due to inattention when an incomplete object is perceived as complete.
Pareidolia illusions- perceives formed objects from ambiguous stimuli/ like seeing a face in the clouds

Question 14

What is a psuedo-hallucination?

Answer 14

A perceptual experience which is figurative, not concretely real and occurs in the inner subjective space, not the external subjective space. This is just auditory…there is no stimulus just perception.

Question 15

What is an Hallucination?

Answer 15

A perception which occurs in the absence of an object. Perceptional experience is false and it is indistinguishable from real perception.

Question 16

What is ‘thought echo’?

Answer 16

This is when your own thoughts are repeated/echoed with very little time from the original thought.

Question 17

What is ‘thought insertion’?

Answer 17

The subject experiences thoughts which are not his own intruding into his mind. In the most typical case, the alien thoughts are said to have been inserted into the mind from outside, by means of radar telepathy or some other means.

Question 18

What is ‘thought withdrawal’?

Answer 18

This is when the subject says that his thoughts have been removed from his head by an external agency so that he has no thoughts (often able to describe the sensation of the thoughts leaving).

Question 19

What is ‘thought broadcast’?

Answer 19

This is when the subject experiences thoughts being shared with others often through the radio/TV.

Question 20

What are delusions of control/passivity?

Answer 20

Delusions that ones thoughts, feelings or actions are being replaced by those of an external agency.

Question 21

What is a ‘delusional perception’?

Answer 21

A type of primary delusion. This is present when the patient receives a normal perception (like traffic light change) and then interprets it with a delusional meaning and has immense personal meaning. (like i am the king of mars). So the stimulus is real but the perception is false/delusional disbelief.

Question 22

What are negative symptoms?

Answer 22

These are a cluster of symptoms that occur together in chronic schizophrenia.

Question 23

What is ‘clouding of consciousness’?

Answer 23

This represents a step down from the normal alertness. There is deterioration in thinking, attention, perception and memory and usually drowsiness and reduced awareness of environment. (seen in delirium)

Question 24

What is lability?

Answer 24

Mood is rapidly changeable often without any obvious cause.

Question 25

What is a delusion?

Answer 25

This is a fixed firmly held belief that is held with unshakable conviction despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary and cannot be explained by the subject’s cultural or religious background.

Question 26

What is a nihilistic delusion?

Answer 26

This is a delusion of extreme negativity, no longer existing, about to die or even being dead, or about to experience a terrible doom.

Question 27

What is a grandiose delusion?

Answer 27

Delusion of being of a special status or significance of having a special power or a special mission or purpose.

Question 28

What is aphasia?

Answer 28

No speech, inability to produce words orally

Question 29

What is concrete thinking?

Answer 29

Inability to understand abstract ideas or concepts, literalness of understanding or expression. (autism)

Question 30

What is ‘ideas of reference’?

Answer 30

Belief that events or occurrences are directly related to the patient. (watching the news-related to them)

Question 31

What is ‘loosening of associations’?

Answer 31

Thoughts that move one to the next with no logical progression.

Question 32

What are neoligisms?

Answer 32

Made up words

Question 33

What is perseveration?

Answer 33

Persistent repetition of the same thoughts or ideas. Response to the first stimuli given inappropriately to subsequent different stimuli.

Question 34

Which condition comprises the combination of nihilistic delusions and/or hypochondriacal delusions in depressive psychosis?

Answer 34

Cotard’s syndrome

Question 35

What is a somatic delusion?

Answer 35

Delusion about the body, having a medical condition or deformity.

Question 36

What is ‘thought blocking’?

Answer 36

Sudden loss of train of thought, or mind just going blank.

Question 37

What is ‘dereistic thinking’?

Answer 37

Idiosyncratic thinking that is not being falsified by reality, eg. daydreaming.

Question 38

What is an ‘obsessional thought’?

Answer 38

A recurrent idea, image or impulse that is perceived as being senseless, this is unsuccessfully resisted, and that results in marked anxiety and distress.

Question 39

What is rumination?

Answer 39

repetitive and pointless internal debates

Question 40

What is folie a deux?

Answer 40

One psychotic person communicates his delusion to another person so that he too becomes psychotic.

Question 41

What is magical thinking?

Answer 41

An irrational belief that certain outcomes are connected to certain thoughts, words of actions ‘if I hold me nose, someone will die’.

Question 42

What is the difference between a delusion and an over-valued idea?

Answer 42

An over-valued idea is a firmly held belief which comes to dominate thinking and behaviour but it is not fixed like a delusion.

Question 43

What is clang of association?

Answer 43

This is when flight of ideas (with logical progression) rhyme?

Question 44

What is a partition delusion?

Answer 44

A partition delusion is the belief that people, objects or radiation can pass through what would normally constitute a barrier to such passage. These delusions have been reported to be common in late paraphrenia and late-onset schizophrenia.

Question 45

What is an automatism?

Answer 45

the performance of actions without conscious thought or intention.
“diabetic patients who commit crimes while hypoglycaemic may be able to plead automatism”. Common in temporal lobe epilepsy. The patient is unaware of what they are doing and doesn’t remember them afterwards.

Question 46

What is pseudo dementia?

Answer 46

Depressive Pseudodementia is a syndrome seen in older people in which they exhibit symptoms consistent with dementia but the cause is actually depression.

Question 47

What is a pseudo seizure?

Answer 47

Psychogenic nonepileptic seizures (PNES), or pseudoseizures are paroxysmal episodes that resemble and are often misdiagnosed as epileptic seizures; however, PNES are psychological (i.e., emotional, stress-related) in origin. Paroxysmal nonepileptic episodes can be either organic or psychogenic

Question 48

What is the most specific frontal lobe sign to do with injury here etc?

Answer 48

Perseveration

Question 49

What is a sub cortical dementia?

Answer 49

Vascular, Huntingtons’s etc.

Question 50

Which clinical feature is most indicative of subcortical dementia?

Answer 50

Inattention ( this is preserved in the early stages of cortical dementia e.g. alzheimers etc).

Question 51

Which hallucinations tend to occur in delirium?

Answer 51

Visual hallucinations

Question 52

What is derailment?

Answer 52

Most only a vague connection between topics. It can be considered to lie on the more extreme end of the spectrum from flight of ideas where there is a more clear cut yet rapid leap from one topic to another.