Psychosis: intro to psychotic symptoms Flashcards
What is psychosis?
A mental disorder in which all the aspects shown below are all sufficiently impaired, interfering with patient’s capacity to deal with reality.
Thoughts
Affective response or ability to recognise reality
Ability to communicate and relate to other
What is the classic characteristics of psychosis?
- Hallucinations
- Delusions
- Disorder of form of thought
What is dementia praecox now known as?
Schizophrenia
Psychosis is characterised by a lack of insight. True/false?
True
Psychosis has no effect on the individuals functioning and interpersonal relationships. True/false?
False. Psychosis does have an effect on the individuals functioning and interpersonal relationships.
Some symptoms of psychosis?
- Hallucinations
- Delusions (fixed, falsely lead belief, impervious to logical argument/evidence).
- Ideas of reference
- Forward thought disorder
- Thought interference
- Loss of insight
What is a hallucination?
Perception that occurs in the absence of an external stimulus.
Experienced as originating in real space, not in your thoughts (e.g. not like inner speech).
What hallucination types can occur?
Any of the 5 senses:
- Gustatory (taste)
- Tactile (touch)
- Visual (sight)
- Auditory (sound)
- Olfactory (smell)
What are ideas of reference?
False beliefs that random or irrelevant occurrences in the world directly relate to oneself.
Examples include:
- Thinking there is a message in newspaper about them.
- Seeing meaning in other peoples gestures.
- Knowing that other peoples conversations or social media postings are about them.
Types of thought interference?
Thought insertion
Thought withdrawal
Thought broadcasting
Thought blocking
What is thought insertion example?
“There are thoughts being put into my head that don’t belong to me - haven’t thought them”
What is thought withdrawal example?
“They can extract the information from me using the internet, they take the thoughts out of my head”.
What is thought broadcasting example?
“It’s like everyone can know what I’m thinking - sky dish is beaming my thoughts to the neighbour”
What is thought blocking example?
“It’s like i get halfway through thinking something and the thoughts just dry up and I can’t think anything for a while”.
Since thoughts cannot be directly observed, they must be observed through the patients speech. True/false?
True
What is Knight’s move thinking?
A form of formal thought disorder, common in psychosis, in which connections between sentences or parts of sentences are without a coherent train of thought.
AKA lack of thought coherence. Topic changing from one sentence to the next.
What are neologisms?
A schizophrenia speech pattern where new words or phrases are invented.
Patient will make up new words that are in their “dictionary”.
What is verbigeration/word salad?
A jumble of extremely incoherent speech as sometimes observed in schizophrenia
e.g. happy green friendly running bananas.
What is tangentiality?
A disturbance in the thought process that causes the individual to relate excessive or irrelevant detail that never reaches the essential point of a conversation or the desired answer to a question.
