Psychosis Flashcards
Define psychosis
Patient is out of touch with reality and is experiencing things differently to others.
Are unaware of this.
Give some psychotic symptoms
Delusions
Hallucinations
Formal thought disorder
Disorders of the self
Define hallucination
A perception in the absence of external stimulus in any one of the five sensory modalities
Which type of hallucination is commonest in psychosis?
Auditory
When can you get visual psychoses?
Delerium
What would an olfactory hallucination indicate?
Frontal lobe pathology
Define a delusion
A problem of thought and perception.
- Fixed, firmly held belief
- Held despite contrary evidence
- Cannot be reasoned away
- Out of keeping with the person’s societal norms
How can delusions be classified?
Gradiose Persecutory Hypochondrial Reference Guilt Erotomania
Define a formal thought disorder
Disorganised thinking which manifests as disorganised speech
- Each sentence doesn’t follow on from the previous sentence
Give some differential diagnoses of psychosis
- Organic causes
- Delirium
- Epilepsy (temporal lobe epilepsy)
- Space occupying lesions
- Dementia
- Endocrine e.g. Cushings
- Drug-induced
- Functional psychosis
With what conditions can psychosis occur in?
- Schizophrenia
- Mood disorder - depression and mania
- Substance misuse
- Organic disorder e.g. dementia, Parkinson’s, epilepsy
What is Insight?
Having an idea about what is going on/what is wrong
- patients some psychoses don’t realise that something is wrong
