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 Posted: Wed Nov 16, 2005 9:55 am
O-o I love you all. heart Anyway, i'm making this because I just joined and most people are all "Blablabla Depression." I know you have problems, I do too, and i'm not trying to tell you what to do. This is simply something i made and plan on updating frequently, maybe every day. It's about mental disorders, how they are linked, signs, and so on. think of it as an informational topic.
most information is from www.answers.com, consultants, or related sites.List of shiz0r is soon to come. *goes to get medical binder* heart
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Posted: Wed Nov 16, 2005 9:56 am
[ Message temporarily off-line ]
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Posted: Wed Nov 16, 2005 9:57 am
[ Message temporarily off-line ]
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Posted: Wed Nov 16, 2005 9:58 am
formal thought disorder
In psychiatry, thought disorder or formal thought disorder is a term used to describe a symptom of psychotic mental illness. It describes a persistent underlying disturbance to conscious thought and is classified largely by its effects on speech and writing. Affected persons may show pressure of speech (speaking incessantly and quickly), derailment or flight of ideas (switching topic mid-sentence or inappropriately), thought blocking, rhyming, punning or 'word salad' when individual words may be intact but speech is incoherent.
Nancy Andreasen[1] (#wp-endnote_1) has given the following definitions.
* Pressure of speech - An increase in the amount of spontaneous speech compared to what is considered customary.
* Distractible speech - During mid speech, the subject is changed in response to a stimulus. e.g. "Then I left San Francisco and moved to... where did you get that tie ?"
* Tangentiality - Replying to questions in an oblique, tangential or irrelevant manner. e.g. "What city are you from ?", "Well, that's a hard question. I'm from Iowa. I really don't know where my relatives came from, so I don't know if I'm Irish or French".
* Derailment - Ideas slip off the track on to another which is obliquely related or unrelated. e.g. "The next day when I'd be going out you know, I took control, like uh, I put bleach on my hair in California".
* Incoherence (word salad) - Speech that is unintelligible due to the fact that, though the individual words are real words, the manner in which they are strung together results in incoherent gibberish, e.g. the question "Why do people believe in God?" elicits a response like "Because make a twirl in life, my box is broken help me blue elephant. Isn't lettuce brave? I like electrons, hello."
* Illogicality - Conclusions are reached that do not follow logically (non sequiturs or faulty inductive inferences).
* Clanging - Sounds rather than meaningful relationships appear to govern words. e.g. "I'm not trying to make noise. I'm trying to make sense. If you can't make sense out of nonsense, well, have fun".
* Neologisms - New word formations. e.g. "I got so angry I picked up a dish and threw it at the geshinker".
* Word approximations - Old words used in a new and unconventional way. e.g. "His boss was a seeover".
* Circumstantiality - Speech that is very delayed at reaching its goal. Excessive long windedness.
* Loss of goal - Failure to show a chain of thought to a natural conclusion.
* Perseveration - Persistent repetition of words or ideas. e.g. "I'll think I'll put on my hat, my hat, my hat, my hat, my hat, my hat, my hat, my hat..."
* Echolalia - Echoing of other people's speech e.g. "Can we talk for a few minutes?", "Talk for a few minutes".
* Blocking - Interruption of train of speech before completed.
* Stilted speech - Speech excessively stilted and formal. e.g. "The attorney comported himself indecorously".
* Self-reference - Patient repeatedly and inappropriately refers back to self. e.g. "What's the time?", "It's 7 o'clock. That's my problem".
* Phonemic paraphasia - Mispronounciation; syllables out of sequence. e.g. "I slipped on the lice broke my arm".
* Semantic paraphasia - Substitution of inappropriate word. e.g. "I slipped on the coat, on the ice I mean, and broke my book".
The concept of thought disorder has been criticised as being based on circular or incoherent definitions[2] (#wp-endnote_2). For example, thought disorder is inferred from disordered speech, however it is assumed that disordered speech arises because of disordered thought. Similarly the definition of 'Incoherence' (word salad) is that speech is incoherent.
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Posted: Wed Nov 16, 2005 9:59 am
[ Message temporarily off-line ]
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Posted: Wed Nov 16, 2005 9:59 am
[ Message temporarily off-line ]
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Posted: Wed Nov 16, 2005 10:00 am
Hallucinations
Perception of visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or gustatory experiences without an external stimulus and with a compelling sense of their reality, usually resulting from a mental disorder or as a response to a drug. false perception characterized by a distortion of real sensory stimuli. Common types of hallucination are auditory, i.e., hearing voices or noises and visual, i.e., seeing people that are not actually present. Hallucinations play a prominent role in schizophrenia and in the mania stage of bipolar disorder (see depression). They are also significant during withdrawal from various drugs, particularly depressants such as barbiturates, heroin, and alcohol (see delirium tremens), and under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD, mescaline, and psylocybin. Hallucinations may occur in normal people under conditions of sensory deprivation, emotional stress, religious exaltation, or great fatigue.
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Posted: Wed Nov 16, 2005 10:01 am
Delerium
A temporary state of mental confusion and fluctuating consciousness resulting from high fever, intoxication, shock, or other causes. It is characterized by anxiety, disorientation, hallucinations, delusions, and incoherent speech. Delirium is a medical term used to describe a mental state. Delirium is probably the single most common acute disorder affecting adults in general hospitals. It affects 10-20% of all adults in hospital, and 30-40% in older patients.
There are several definitions (including those in the DSM-IV and ICD-10). However, all include some core features.
The core features are:
* disturbance of consciousness (that is, reduced clarity of awareness of the environment, with reduced ability to focus, sustain, or shift attention
* change in cognition (eg. memory impairment) or a perceptual disturbance
* onset of hours to days, and tendency to fluctuate.
Common features include:
* intrusive abnormalities of awareness and affect, such as hallucinations or innappropriate emotional states.
Delirium should be distinguished from psychosis, in which consciousness and cognition may not be impaired, and dementia which describes an acquired intellectual impairment usually resulting from a degenerative brain disease.
Delirium may be caused by severe physical or mental illness. Fever, poisons (including toxic drug reactions), brain injury, surgery, severe lack of food or water, drug and severe alcohol withdrawal are all known to cause delirium.
It is also referred to as 'acute confusional state' or 'acute brain syndrome'.
Impairment of consciousness
A delirious person may have a clouding of awareness and consciousness. This impairment of consciousness typically fluctates, so the person may be aroused and alert for short periods of time before again relapsing into a clouded state. Fluctation may follow a pattern of diurnal variation, where consciousness levels change as the day progresses. Typically, a delirious person may be more consciousness impaired in the evening and at night.
Confusion and disorientation
Confusion may occur in delirium, where the sufferer loses the capacity for clear and coherent thought. It may be apparent in disorganised or incoherent speech, the inability to concentrate or a lack of goal directed thinking.
Disorientation describes the loss of awareness of the surroundings, environment and context in which the person exists. Disorientation may occur in time (not knowing what time of day, day of week, month, season or year it is), place (not know where you are) or person (not knowing who you are).
Cognitive Impairments
Impairments to cognition may include reduction in the function of short or long term memory, attention or problem solving.
Abnormalities of Awareness and Affect
Hallucinations (perceived sensory experience with the lack of an external source) or distortions of reality may occur in delirium. Commonly these are visual distortions, and can take the form of masses of small crawling creatures (particularly common in delirium tremens, caused by severe alcohol withdrawal) or distortions in size or intensity of the surrounding environment.
Strange beliefs may also be held during a delirious state, but these are not considered delusions in the clinical sense as they are considered too short lived. Interestingly, in some cases sufferers may be left with false or delusional memories after delirium, basing their memories on the confused thinking or sensory distortion which occurred.
Abnormalities of affect include any distortions to perceived or communicated emotional states. Emotional states may also fluctate, so a person may rapidly change between, for example, terror, sadness and jocularity.
Duration
The duration of delirium is typically affected by the underlying cause. If caused by a fever, the delirious state should subside as does the severity of the fever.
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Posted: Wed Nov 16, 2005 10:02 am
Clinical Lycanthropy
a psychiatric syndrome that involves a delusional belief that the affected person is, or has, transformed into an animal. It is named after the mythical condition of lycanthropy, a supernatural affliction in which people are said to physically shapeshift into werewolves. Affected individuals report a delusional belief that they have transformed, or are in the process of transforming into another animal. It has been linked with the altered states of mind that accompany psychosis (the reality-bending mental state that typically involves delusions and hallucinations) with the transformation only seeming to happen in the mind and behaviour of the affected person.
A study1 on lycanthropy from the McLean Hospital reported on a series of cases and proposed some diagnostic criteria by which lycanthropy could be recognised:
* A patient reports in a moment of clarity or looking back he sometimes feels as an animal or has felt like one.
* A patient behaves in a manner that resembles animal behaviour, for example crying, grumbling or creeping.
According to these criteria, either a delusional belief in current or past transformation, or behaviour that suggests a person thinks of themselves as transformed, is considered evidence of clinical lycanthropy. The authors go on to note that although the condition seems to be an expression of psychosis there is no specific diagnosis of mental or neurological illness associated with its behavioural consequences.
It also seems that lycanthropy is not specific to an experience of human-to-wolf transformation; a wide variety of creatures have been reported as part of the shape-shifting experience. A review2 of the medical literature from early 2004 lists over thirty published cases of lycanthropy, only the minority of which have wolf or dog themes. Canines are certainly not uncommon, although the experience of being transformed into cats, horses, birds and tigers has been reported on more than one occasion, with frogs, and even bees, being reported in some instances. A 1989 case study3 described how one individual reported a serial transformation, experiencing a change from human, to dog, to horse, and then finally cat, before returning to the reality of human existence after treatment. There are also reports of people who experienced transformation into an animal only listed as 'unspecified.'
Proposed mechanisms
Clinical lycanthropy is a rare condition and is largely considered to be an idiosyncratic expression of a psychotic-episode caused by another condition such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or clinical depression.
However, there are suggestions that certain neurological and cultural influences may lead to the expression of the human-animal transformation theme that defines the condition.
Neurological factors
One important factor may be differences or changes in parts of the brain known to be involved in representing body shape (e.g. see proprioception, body image). A brain imaging study4 of two people diagnosed with clinical lycanthropy showed that these areas display unusual activation, suggesting that when people report their bodies are changing shape, they may be genuinely perceiving those feelings. Body image distortions are not unknown in mental and neurological illness, so this may help explain at least part of the process. One further puzzle is why an affected person doesn't simply report that their body "feels like it is changing in odd ways", rather than presenting with a delusional belief that they are changing into a specific animal. There is much evidence that psychosis is more than just odd perceptual experiences so perhaps lycanthropy is the result of these unusual bodily experiences being understood by an already mixed-up mind, perhaps filtered through the lens of cultural traditions and ideas.
Cultural contributions
Cultural influences are thought to strongly influence the content of psychosis and psychosis-like experiences and we have a large cultural resource when it comes to human-to-animal transformation, as many societies have included this concept into myths, stories, or rituals (see lycanthropy for many such examples). There have also been cases of 'feral children' seemingly raised by animals after losing their parents and many have been reliably documented in modern times. Psychiatrist Lucien Malson collected over fifty cases in his landmark book Wolf Children and the Problem of Human Nature5. More cases have surfaced since its publication in 1964, suggesting that some beliefs about lycanthropy might stem from observations of unusual maternal relationships between humans and animals.
There is room to argue that the supernatural lycanthropy myths could originate from people relating their experiences of what could be now classified as psychosis. In reality the interaction between human experience and culture is difficult (perhaps impossible) to separate, and lycanthropy is no different. While mainstream psychiatry assumes that someone who believes themselves to be an animal is mentally ill, someone who deliberately tries to accomplish the same with psychoactive potions and ritual is considered a shaman in many societies around the world.
In earlier times the state of the patient was commonly explained as due to possession. Marcellus of Sida reported that in Greece the patients frequented the tombs at night, and that they were recognizable by their yellow complexion, hollow eyes and dry tongue. The Garrows of India are said to tear their hair when they are seized with the complaint, which is put down to the use of a drug applied to the forehead; this recalls the stories of the witch's salve in Europe. In Abyssinia the patient is usually a woman; two forms are distinguished, caused by the hyena and the leopard respectively. A kind of trance ushers in the fit; the fingers are clenched, the eyes glazed and the nostrils distended; the patient, when she comes to herself, laughs hideousliy and runs on all fours. The exorcist is a blacksmith; as a rule, he applies onion or garlic to her nose and proceeds to question the evil spirit.
Clinical lycanthropy has been sometimes associated with latah behaviour, described by the Malay people. However, modern latah is rarely associated with the sort of animal-transformation experiences and beliefs that are characteristic of the mainstream psychiatric definition of lycanthropy.
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Posted: Wed Nov 16, 2005 10:03 am
Hysteria
A mental disorder characterized by emotional excitability and sometimes by amnesia or a physical deficit, such as paralysis, or a sensory deficit, without an organic cause. in psychology, a disorder commonly known today as conversion disorder, in which a psychological conflict is converted into a bodily disturbance. It is distinguished from hypochondria by the fact that its sufferers do not generally confuse their condition with real, physical disease. Conversion disorder is usually found in patients with immature, histrionic personalities who are under great stress. Women are affected twice as frequently as men. Symptoms, which are largely symbolic and which relieve the patient's anxiety, include limb paralysis, blindness, or convulsive seizures. The specific physical disorder usually does not correspond to the anatomy; e.g., an entire limb may be paralyzed rather than a specific group of muscles. The person may also appear to be unconcerned about the illness, a condition French psychiatrist Pierre Janet called la belle indifference (1929). At the end of the 19th cent., great advances were made in the understanding and cure of hysteria by the recognition of its psychogenic nature and by the use of hypnotism to influence the hysteric patient, who is known to have a high degree of suggestibility. The Austrian physician Josef Breuer, the French psychologists J. M. Charcot and Pierre Janet, and Austrian psychiatrist Sigmund Freud were pioneers in the investigation of hysteria through hypnosis. Freud concluded that hysterical symptoms were symbolic representations of a repressed unconscious event, accompanied by strong emotions that could not be adequately expressed or discharged at the time. Instead, the strong effect associated with the event was diverted into the wrong somatic channels (conversion), and the physical symptom resulted. Psychoanalysis has had reasonable success in helping patients suffering from conversion disorder.
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Posted: Wed Nov 16, 2005 10:04 am
Hypochondria
The persistent conviction that one is or is likely to become ill, often involving symptoms when illness is neither present nor likely, and persisting despite reassurance and medical evidence to the contrary. in psychology, a disorder characterized by an exaggeration of imagined or negligible physical ailment. The hypochondriac fears that such minor symptoms indicate a serious disease, and tends to be self-centered and socially withdrawn. Continually seeking professional help to reinforce his fears, the hypochondriac never feels he is receiving adequate care. Contemporary theorists have arrived at similar conclusions, suggesting that the physical ailments of hypochondriacs were a form of escape from psychological stress. The disorder is technically known as hypochondriasis, and is classified as a somatoform disorder, or one in which a psychological problem manifests itself in a physical ailment.
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Posted: Wed Nov 16, 2005 10:05 am
[ Message temporarily off-line ]
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Posted: Wed Nov 16, 2005 10:05 am
If you have any topics you think should be added, please PM them to me.
Thank you. heart
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Posted: Wed Nov 16, 2005 10:06 am
RESERVED This is a spare. Go me.
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Posted: Fri Nov 25, 2005 2:59 pm
i hope you know that everything that doctors say are signs can sometimes contradict what really happens to a person before they're diagnosed. As for me personally the only sign i showed of depression was abnormal sleeping habits. But, other than that i seemed as normal as can be, since i would hide all my feelings. So be careful what you're teeling people. Doctors aren't always right TRUST ME>
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![[.dances.with.bunnies.]'s avatar](https://a1cdn.gaiaonline.com/dress-up/avatar/ava/f5/e4/455acd6a1ee4f5_flip.png?t=1153815283_3.00_00)
