Psychotic Disorders

Question 1

What is psychosis and how may it affect a person?

Answer 1

Psychosis can occur as a result of brain injury or disease, or most often described as a symptom of mental illness.
Patients experiencing psychosis have impaired reality testing; that is, they are unable to distinguish personal subjective experience from the reality of the external world.

Question 2

What are the thre main symtoms that occur as part of psychosis?

Answer 2

Hallucinations, Delusions and Dosorganised thoughts and behaviour.

Question 3

Describe what hallucinations are?

Answer 3

Reaction to the 5 senses - feeling touched as if something is on their skin, altered taste, hearing voices, seeing things and smelling things that aren’t there. Something on the 5 senses that general other people cannot sense.

Question 4

What are delusions?

Answer 4

A fixed false belief, fixed meaning that all the persuasion we try and use to tell someone it is false will not work. It’s not useful to try and convince someone that their belief is not fixed .

Question 5

What are disorgansied thoughts?

Answer 5

Dosorganised thoughts are due to sensory overloaded - can no longer process thoughts

Question 6

What age are males and females diagnosed with psychosis?

Answer 6

15-25 years for males

25-35 years for females

Question 7

What are positivie symptoms?

Answer 7

Symptoms that are experiences that happen in addition to normal experience.

Question 8

What are negative symptoms?

Answer 8

Symtpoms that incorporate a loss or decrease in normal functionng

Question 9

What are cognitive symtpoms?

Answer 9

Symptoms that affect our ability to reason and problem solve.

Question 10

What are some examples of positive symptoms?

Answer 10

Hallucinations, Delusions, Thought Disorders, Movement Disorder.

Question 11

What are movememnt disorders?

Answer 11

Agitated body movement, they may repeat certain movement over and over. They can also become catatonic where they do not move or respond to others at all.

Question 12

What are thought disorders?

Answer 12

Disorganized thinking; This is when a person has trouble organizing his or her thoughts or connecting them logically. They may talk in a garbled way that is hard to understand.
Thought blocking; This is when a person stops speaking abruptly in the middle of a thought. When asked why he or she stopped talking, the person may say that it felt as if the thought had been taken out of his or her head.
Neologisms; a person with a thought disorder might make up meaningless words

Question 13

BiPOlar

Answer 13

lithium

Question 14

Depression

Answer 14

antidepressents

Question 15

How to typical antipsychotics work?

Answer 15

Typical antipsychotic drugs interfere with dopaminergic neurotransmission in the limbic system and in the cerebral cortex (areas involved in the control of motivated and emotional behaviour and in facilitating organized thought) & this can be helpful in alleviating the positive symptoms of schizophrenia.

Question 16

How to typical antipsychotics negatively affect the person?

Answer 16

typical antipsychotics affect other D2 pathways in the brain, including those the extrapyramidal dopamine pathway involved in voluntary muscle movement. As a result, when these drugs are administered to patients, many experience the motor dysfunction

Question 17

What are Extra Pyramidal Side Effects?

Answer 17

Dystonia –face, neck, back, upper limbs, ocular spasm, facial grimacing, limb spasticity
Tardive Dyskinesia – involuntary movements of the tongue, lip smacking/chewing/sucking, face & limbs
Akathisia – restlessness, fidgety, rocking movements, pacing, uneasiness
Pseudo-parkinsonisms – symptoms of Parkinson’s disease induced by medication: Rigidity, tremor, shuffling gait

Question 18

What are some side effects of antipsychotic drugs?

Answer 18

weight gain, nausea, vomiting , constipation, increased BP.

Question 19

What is Cloazpine used for?

Answer 19

A powerful atypical antipsychotic that causes far less EPS than other antipsychotics

Question 20

What is the aisde effect that cuses most concern for someone on Clozapine?

Answer 20

Agranullocytosis: resulting in lowered WBC count and lowever neutrophil count.

Question 21

what is the aim of antipsychotic medications?

Answer 21

To control the acute symptoms of psychosis , particularly hallucinations, delusional thinking, bizarre behaviour, agitation and paranoia
• To prevent relapse of the illness
• Reduction in symptoms of organic disorders – i.e. for sedation, agitation in dementia also use for acute mania and can help with suicidal thinking