Schizophrenia: Terms Flashcards
Akathisia
Psychomotor restlessness evident as pacing or fidgeting.
Acute Dystonia
Acute sustained contraction of muscles, usually of the head and neck.
Pseudoparkinsonism
A medication-induced, temporary constellation of sx associated with Parkinson’s disease; tremor, reduced accessory movements, impaired gait, and/or stiffening of muscles.
Affect
Outward manifestation of a person’s feelings/emotions; for schizophrenia, affect is usually flat, blunted, inappropriate, or bizarre.
Associative Looseness
Disorganized thinking; manifested as jumbled and illogical speech and impaired reasoning.
Autism
Thinking is not bound to reality but reflects the private perceptual world of the individual (i.e. delusions, hallucinations, neologisms).
Ambivalence
Simultaneously holding two opposing emotions, attitudes, ideas, or wishes toward the same person, situation, or object.
Positive Sx
The presence of something that is not normally present (i.e. hallucination, delusions, bizarre behavior, paranoia).
Negative Sx
The absence of something that should be present but is not (i.e. apathy, lack of motivation, anhedonia, poor thought processes).
Cognitive Sx
Abnormalities in how a person thinks.
Affective Sx
Sx involving emotions and their expression.
Anosognosia
Lack of insight to the illness; caused by the illness itself
Delusions
False, fixed beliefs.
Neologisms
Made-up words or idiosyncratic uses of existing words that have meaning for the patient but a different or nonexistent meaning to others.
Echolalia
Pathological repeating of another’s words.
Echopraxia
Mimicking of movements of another.
Clang Association
Choice of words based on their sound rather than their meaning, often rhyming and sometimes having a similar beginning sound.
Word Salad
A jumble of words that is meaningless to the listener.
Depersonalization
A nonspecific feeling that a person has lost his or her identity and that the self is different or unreal (i.e. seeing fingers as snakes or arms as rotting wood).
Derealization
A false perception that the environment has changed (i.e. everything seems bigger or smaller).
Hallucinations
Perceiving a sensory experience for which no external stimulus exists; may be auditory, visual, olfactory, gustatory, or tactile.
Illusions
Misperceptions or misinterpretations of a real experience (i.e. seeing a coat on a rack as a bear that is about to attack).
Command Hallucinations
Voices that direct the person to take an action.
Boundary Impairment
Impaired ability to sense where one’s body ends and others’ bodies begin (i.e. pt drinks another’s beverage, believing that because it’s in his vicinity, it’s his).
