Psychosis Flashcards
What is Psychosis?
The loss of contact with reality.
The ability to perceive and respond to the environment is disturbed.
Symptoms may include hallucinations (false sensory perceptions) or delusions (false beliefs).
What can cause Psychosis?
Substance-Induced
Brain Injury
Most commonly occurs due to Schizophrenia.
Who has Schizophrenia?
Found more frequently in lower socioeconomic groups.
Equal in gender but men have earlier, more severe symptoms.
Equal between racial groups.
Downward Drift Theory
Schizophrenia causes victims from higher social levels to fall and remain at lower levels.
3 Categories of Schizophrenia Symptoms
Positive
Negative
Psychomotor
Positive Symptoms
These are pathological excesses that add to a person's behaviour. Delusions Disordered Thinking and Speech Heightened Perceptions Hallucinations
Negative Symptoms
These are pathological deficits that a person lacks.
Poverty of Speech (alogia)
Blunted Effect - Immobile, no eye contact, monotone, uninterested
Social Withdrawal
Loss of Motivation/Directedness
Psychomotor Symptoms
Awkward movements
Odd gestures
Catatonia = extreme forms of these symptoms
- include stupor, rigidity, posture, and excitement
Diagnosing Schizophrenia
DSM-IV identifies 5 types…
Disorganized - confusion, incoherence
Catatonic - psychomotor disturbance
Paranoid - delusions and auditory hallucinations
Undifferentiated - symptoms which fit no subtype
Residual - symptoms have lessened in strength and number, displays few inappropriate emotions
Type I and Type II
Type I is dominated by positive symptoms:
Later onset of symptoms
More positive outcome
Symptoms tied to biochemical abnormalities
Type II is dominated by negative symptoms:
Earlier onset of symptoms
Less positive outcome
Symptoms tied to structural abnormalities
Biological Views
Biochemical Abnormalities:
Dopamine may be overactive in schizophrenic patients due to more dopamine receptors.
Abnormal Brain Structure:
Brain scans have shown that patients have enlarged ventricles. Also smaller frontal lobes and abnormal blood flow.
Psychological Views
Freud believed that schizophrenia developed from two processes:
Regression to the pre-ego stage
Efforts to reestablish ego control
- The world is harsh so people regress to an early stage where they only have to focus on themselves
Sociocultural Views
Theorists believe that patients are victims of social forces such as multicultural factors, social labeling, and family dysfunction.
Difficulty in judging what is normal, ‘the sane in insane places’.
Double bind Communications - different messages are portrayed by parents so the child is always wrong, schizophrenia is the child’s way of attempting to deal with the mixed communications.
Antipsychotic Drugs
Dates back to the 1940s, through the development of anti-histamines.
Reduces symptoms in 65% of patients.
Reduces positive symptoms quicker than negative.
Conventional, then atypical (recent years).
Effects of Antipsychotic Drugs
Side effects of conventional antipsychotics appear up to 1 year after starting the medication.
Tardive Dyskinesia involves writhing or tic-like involuntary movements. It affects over 10% of people who take the drugs. Can be difficult to eliminate.
Atypical can cause dizziness, weight gain, and elevations in blood sugar levels. Fewer side effects than conventional.
