Delusions Flashcards
DSM-4
Delusion: false belief that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary
Primary delusions
- Jaspers: primary delusions are the true, un-understandable beliefs that arrive fully formed and cannot be reduced further to any other mental experiences
- often precede other phenomena
Autochthonous delusions
- delusional intuitions
- ideas that occur ‘out of the blue’
- Wernicke formulated this idea
Delusional perception
- normally perceived object is given new meaning
- normal perecption precedes the attachment of delusional significance
- Schneider first rank
Delusional mood
- refers to the sense of perplexity and uncertainty that exists during a prodrome of psychosis
- usually ends in an autochthonous delusion
Delusional memory
- 2 types
- retrospectove delusion-something that never happened and so is false and bizarre
- or a normal memory might be delusionally elaborated
- sometimes a normal perception but recollected from memory with a false perception thereafter
Persecutory delusions
-secondary delusions are often persecutory
Paranoid delusions
- paranoid means ‘besides the mind’
- paranoid can only be used for self-referential delusions irrespective of their content
- includes grandiose delusions, persecutory delusions, referential delusions (cameras watching me), hypochondriacal or nihilistic delusion
Monothematic delusions
- single delusions
e. g capgras, cotard, fregoli
Capgras delusion
- doubles
- that is not my mum, it is a person who looks like her, imposter
- first reported by Kahlaum but described by Capgras
- mostly due to organic brain damage, schizophrenia or isolated delusional disorder
Cotard delusion
- I am dead
Fregoli delusion
- I am constantly being followed by people I know but I cant recognise them because they are always in disguise
- inverse to Capgras
- false identification of familiar people in strangers
- first reported by Courbon and Fail
- Fregoli is an italian mimic
- belief that the persecutor can invade the body of others
- rare
Mirrored-self misindentification
-the person I see in the mirror isnt me it is someone who looks like me
DE Clerambault’s delusion
- erotomania
- person X is secretly in love with me (usually a famous person who has never encouraged this idea)
- woman believes that an older man of higher social status is in love with her
- ‘Old maid’s’ insanity when persecutory beliefs coexist
Othello syndrome
-pathological jealousy
Morbid jealousy
- not a misidentification syndrome
- described by Ey
- common in alcoholics
- potential for violence
Hypochanodriacal delusions
- typically seen in psychotic depression in the elderly
- part of Cotard’s
- Monosymptomatic hypochondriacal psychosis -described by Munro
- delusion of body odour= olfactory reference syndrome.
- Ekbom’s syndrome-delusional infestation
- dysmorphic delusions
Syndrome of subjective doubles
-patient believes that another person has been physically transformed into his own self and that their exact doubles of himself
Intermetamorphosis
- A becomes C, C becomes B etc
- people transforming their physical and psychological identities
- Courbon and Tusques
- very rare
Paraprosopia
- very rare
- redescribed by Ellis
- a face appears to tranform into a grotesque mask
- mostly reported in schizophrenic children but also observed in adults
Ideas of reference
- people take notice or observe him
- not seen in mania
- paranoid PD
- may procede development of full-blown schizophrenia
Overvalued ideas
- Wernicke
- solitary abnormal beliefs that dominate a person’s life but neither delusional nor obsessional
- dominate subject’s life
- anorexia, body dysmorphia, morbid jealousy, transsexualism
Folie a deux
- shared delusion in which psychotic person transfers his delusions to one or more people close to him
- the non-psychotic person usually exhibits dependent traits on the primary patient
- separation of the pair can result in remission
Doppelganger
- awareness of oneself as being both outside and inside oneself
- cognitive and ideational disturbance
- can occur in the absence of mental illness
- not a delusional misidentification syndrome
