Psychosis

Psychosis is a mental disorder characterized by distorted perception of the world around us and impaired thinking. It can manifest itself in the form of hallucinations, delusions, emotional instability and other symptoms. Psychosis often occurs in people who suffer from depression, schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.

Symptoms of psychosis usually appear gradually and may worsen over time. For example, a person may experience auditory hallucinations where he hears the voice of a stranger telling him something important. This voice can be in your head constantly and can be very intrusive. Hallucinations can also occur in the form of visual images, such as objects or images. These objects can appear and disappear, as well as move and change shape. Hallucinations can be both positive and negative. Middle-aged people most often suffer from psychosis. They are struck by the delirium of damage - guilt that they have committed some illegal action. There may be a feeling of impending death.

The occurrence of psychosis affects thinking. In the affected mind, the picture becomes incomplete, unpredictable, it resists logic. Visual, auditory, and olfactory hallucinations are distinguished by their scarcity of colors, monotony, and strange fantastic details. One of the important features of these disorders is that they usually have no obvious cause, no physiological basis, and cannot be explained by biological factors or heredity. These disorders are characterized by the sudden onset of symptoms without any reason. Typically, the disorder begins suddenly, then goes through a number of stages and ends with complete recovery from psychosis. Patients are characterized by personality changes, which manifest themselves in increased aggressiveness, suspicion of others, expansiveness, strange, inappropriate reactions from others. People with psychotic disorders have varying degrees of impairment in their ability to carry out daily activities. The more pronounced the disorder, the more significantly the patient’s consciousness is impaired, which leads to limited communication skills, self-care, and in some cases even leads to life-threatening actions.

Psychosis (psychoneurosis, in classical psychiatry - psychotic syndrome) is an acute mental state that is characterized by the appearance of delusions, hallucinations, false memory or other disturbances of perception. In some cases, these phenomena pass without consequences (hallucinatory-paranoid psychosis), in other cases an organic defect occurs (acute delusional state).

There are about 20 syndromes related to psychosis, the main one of which is acute oneiric disorder. It is characterized by the presence of various forms of disorganization, twilight disorders of consciousness and stupefactions (delirious episodes, hallucinosis, amentia), in which massive personality changes occur; states of twilight stupefaction are possible (mental automatisms, affective flattening or other psychopathological disorders).

Psychotic conditions are life-threatening for the patient, sometimes leading to suicide. In the presence of a psychotic disorder, specialized care is important even in the absence of severe intellectual impairment and somatic diseases. Since psychoses in people are exacerbated by stress or the experience of strong emotions, the goal of correcting psychoses is to relieve stressful situations.

The curability of psychoses depends on the factors of the duration of the experience, the presence of concomitant mental disorders, and the level of brain involvement. Also, in the process of treating mental disorders, it is important to take into account that patients can take various drugs and alcohol, which lead to problems in the functioning of the brain and aggravate the picture of psychosis, and also at the stage of the emergence of this diagnosis, psychosocial therapy is possible.