Psychosis Flashcards
What is psychosis?
Any disorder so severe that the victim loses contact with reality
Name 5 psychotic disorders
- Schizophrenia
- Dissociative identity disorder
- Schizoaffective disorder
- Persistent delusional disorders
What is meant by a positive symptom?
Increased compared to normal
What is meant by a negative symptom?
Reduced compared to the normal population
What are the symptoms of schizophrenia?
- Pervasive thought disturbance
- Difficulty in ignoring irrelevant stimuli
- Cognitive deficits
- Withdrawal from personal contact
- Delusions
- Hallucinations
- Emotional disorder - blunted, may have a lack of emotion or emotions may be inappropriate
- Behavioural disruption
- Lack of insight
- Few early friends
- Cant distinguish between fantasy and reality
Describe the cognitive deficits in schizophrenia
- Sustained attention
- Planning
- Verbal and visuospatial working memory
- Language skills
- Explicit learning and memory
- Perceptual/ motor processing
Describe delusions in schizophrenia
- Ideas of reference/changes in salience
- Delusional system - their understanding of how the world works
- Paranoid delusions
What are the most common hallucinations in schizophrenia?
Auditory
Describe the behavioural disruption in schizophrenia
- Catatonic: freeze in position for a long amount of time then break out
- Disorganised: speech is disrupted
What are the subtypes of schizophrenia?
- Catatonic
- Disorganised
- Paranoid
- Simple: behavioural oddity
- Undifferentiated - doesn’t fit into categories
- Residual: very few positive symptoms
What are the causes of schizophrenia?
- Genetics
- Physiological
- Anatomical
- Psychosocial
What are the hypothesises for the physiology of schizophrenia?
- Dopamine hypothesis
* Dopamine-serotonin interaction hypothesis
What is the dopamine hypothesis?
- Overstimulation of dopamine system
* Use of classical antipsychotics
Describe the anatomy of somebody with schizophrenia
- Micro-anatomical changes
- Missing or abnormal neurones
- Cortical- striatal, thalami-coritcal loop
- Reduced brain volume
- Enlarged ventricles
Describe the psychosocial aspects of schizophrenia
- Diagnosis is more common in lower socio-economic classes
- Minority position - more common in minorities
- Urban environment
- Family environment - more expressed emotion
- Cannabis use is more common in those with schizophrenia (is this cause or effect?)
