Symptomen
Psychosis refers to positive and negative symptoms. Positive symptoms are symptoms that are clearly present in a person, such as hallucinations and delusions. The term negative symptom refers to absence or flattening of something, such as emotion, speech, decisiveness or thoughts.
Positive symptoms are:
- Delusions - Thoughts that do not conform to generally accepted beliefs and or ideas from which the patient cannot be dissuaded by logical reasoning. Often, but not always, there is also paranoia; excessive suspicion leading, for example, to the imagination that cameras or microphones are hidden everywhere, that there are plots, or that the person in question is wanted by the police or by international security forces.
- Hallucinations - Perceiving things that are not there, such as voices in the head, images, smells or touch.
- Confused thinking - Psychotics and those around them have great difficulty understanding each other because the thinking and expression process is altered by the psychosis. It is chaotic and/or too slow or too fast. The behavior of the environment is often out of place by the patient (and vice versa). The thought stop, where the patient feels that his thoughts suddenly stop completely, is considered a severe form of thought disorder.
- Confused speaking and writing - Even if the patient's thoughts are coherent, he may have difficulty expressing them in language. Sometimes this manifests itself in hurried speech, strange word choices or the use of neologisms. With greater confusion, symptoms such as echolalia, palilalia or glossolalia may also occur.
- Disturbed emotions - A patient may experience amplified emotions or totally inappropriate to a situation, such as laughing at a funeral. A person may also suddenly become emotional seemingly for no reason; for example, he or she suddenly begins to cry. Emotions may also seem absent.
Negative symptoms are:
- Little speaking
- Showing lack of initiative
- Disturbed day-night rhythm for an extended period of time
- Having little energy
- Low motor expression, including a flat facial expression
- Excessive withdrawal.
Sensitivity
The symptoms of psychosis (especially hallucinations or delusions) are particularly well known in schizophrenia and other psychiatric syndromes such as type I bipolar disorder. Under extreme circumstances, such as war or severe abuse, even people without a history of psychiatric illness can become psychotic.
Yet even under highly stressful circumstances, people do not usually become psychotic, although many do suffer from dissociation and anxiety attacks. Only a small group of people develop psychosis when faced with relatively minor external factors such as job loss, divorce, moving house or vacation. This probably has to do with predisposition: a too little or too much occurrence of certain substances in the brain. This combination of predisposition and external factors is represented in the vulnerability-stress model.
Sometimes psychoses, such as puerperal psychosis, are caused by major hormonal fluctuations. Extreme sleep deprivation and drug abuse can also lead to psychosis. With alcohol poisoning, the psychotic symptoms are known as delirium. Psychosis can also be a reaction to severe depression or burnout.
In recent years, the risks of cannabis use for triggering psychosis have become increasingly apparent.[1][2] Cannabis with a higher THC concentration, particularly skunk, has been found to be even more psychosis provoking.[3]
Description
Sometimes the run-up to psychosis takes several weeks to months, but the state can also develop very quickly.
The phenomenon is somewhat comparable to a person's state of mind after hearing a serious message, such as the death of a loved one or a serious car accident, after which one is "out of this world" for some time. The immediate environment is experienced completely differently for some time. A psychosis also affects cognition so that a psychotic person may no longer be able to read a book, for example.
Every person experiences the world subjectively, but normally has the rational part of the brain to put things in perspective and put them into context. During psychosis, the perception of the outside world is completely determined by the state of mind and no longer put into perspective by the rational. One is in fact detached from reality while at the same time the difference between inner and outer worlds seems to be removed. Typical examples of psychosis are, for example, the patient's perception that persons on television speak to him personally, that advertisements show a special message to him or that neighbors are always watching him.
Sometimes the situation is not so clear, and burnout or depression gradually turns into psychosis. It is then a sliding scale with many degrees, a gray area between feelings of alienation and total psychosis where one experiences a reality that is not there.
Some people do not know of themselves that they have or have had psychosis, while others know even during the psychosis that their perception of reality cannot be right, and therefore sign themselves up for treatment.
Treatment BeterKlinic
BeterKliniek is the clinic for Integrative Medicine that bridges regular and non-regular medicine.
An van Veen (physician) and Michael van Gils (therapist) look for the cause of a condition or disease. That is where the treatment starts otherwise, as people often say, it is 'carrying water to the sea'. We call this cause medicine. Sometimes it is also desirable to treat the symptoms (at the same time). We call this symptom medicine.
Chronic disorders often have their cause in epi- genetics. You can schedule a free informative telephone consultation (phone number 040-7117337 until 1 p.m.) at BeterKliniek to discuss your symptoms so that we can provide you with further advice.
