Echo Symptoms

Echo symptoms

Echo symptoms are the general name for psychopathological phenomena in the form of the patient’s involuntary repetition of words, phrases, movements, and facial expressions of others.

With echo symptoms, the patient unconsciously copies the speech, gestures or actions of other people. This occurs due to disturbances in the functioning of the brain, in particular the frontal lobes, which are responsible for controlling and regulating behavior.

Among the causes of echo symptoms are various mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, autism spectrum disorders, and some forms of dementia. Sometimes echo symptoms are observed in neurological diseases, such as Parkinson's disease.

To treat echo symptoms, drug therapy is used, as well as psychotherapy and correctional methods to train self-control skills and voluntary regulation of behavior. With timely treatment, the manifestations of echo symptoms can significantly decrease or disappear.

Echo symptoms are a non-medical term denoting manifestations of mental disorders characterized by the patient’s unconscious repetition of the speech, movements, etc. of surrounding people. Moreover, any words or phrases spoken by others, without any intervention on the part of the patient, can be immediately repeated after them without any awareness of this by the patient himself. Most often, patients with echo symptoms say “thank you”, “hello”, “sorry”, pronounce individual syllables or even texts (“lecturer” instead of “lecturer”, “photo” instead of “camera”). Patients suffering from alcoholism may respond with echoes of symptoms to requests for something to drink or to demands to pay for something. Echo symptoms can manifest as disorders of speech, motor functions, and general behavior of the patient. The aimless repetition of certain actions was previously well known, but now it is considered as a symptom of active resistance to the patient’s affective outbursts.

The reasons for the appearance of echo symptoms are not entirely clear, but this symptom may indicate neurotic disorders of the patient’s psyche if he does not show any signs of obsession. Experts quite often observe the patient repeating individual syllables, slogans and other elements of colloquial or poetic speech, which outwardly resemble speech automatism. Patients may also experience involuntary repetition of facial expressions and gestures of the interlocutor. As a rule, the patient is not aware of these actions. However, the disease provokes frequent attempts by others who do not know about the person’s disease to make explanatory adjustments to the actions carried out by the patient. In addition to neurotics, other psychiatric patients may also suffer from echo symptoms, such as chronic mental patients, in whom echo symptoms appear in a weakened state due to a weakening of the excitability of the patient’s psyche. This symptom can also be observed in hysterical mental disorders. If symptoms occur against a background of strong feelings, especially in children of different ages, to reduce the scope of negotiations