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Showing posts with label PARANOIA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label PARANOIA. Show all posts

Monday, January 19, 2015

SCHIZOPHRENIA- PARANOIA-MANIC-DEPRESSIVE PSYCHOSIS

SCHIZOPHRENIA

 This is the most common psychosis. It was once called dementia praecox (early loss of mind) because it often appears between the ages of 15 and 30. Schizophrenia means split mind but the illness is not simply a mental fragmentation. It is an extensive deterioration of the personality and a breaking away from reality, a retreat into an unreal world. Schizophrenia manifests itself gradually as a rule, but it may show up abruptly as an acute attack of confusion.

The individual becomes increasingly withdrawn; his emotions become distorted or fade. Schizophrenia takes four forms. Simple schizophrenics are apathetic, inattentive, detached, and indifferent to their surroundings.

Hebephrenic escape from reality through infantile devices-baby talk, thumb-sucking, incontinence

Paranoids experience delusions .of grandeur, considering themselves to be famous figures (the President, Napoleon, even God), or they suffer from ideas of persecution, convinced that they are being hounded, that someone is out to get them. Catatonics may sit motionless for hours or even days, totally unreachable, much like statues, refusing food, and then suddenly they may go into a wild frenzy.

 PARANOIA

This psychosis also is called monomania, delusional in- sanity, and persecutory insanity. Although a paranoid person is extremely ill, he may seem to act fairly normally. He may have adequate memory, logical reasoning, and show no apparent confusion, although his judgment is impaired. The disorder usually strikes between the ages of 30 and SO, particularly among individuals who have been suspicious, jealous, self-centered. A victim of paranoia suffers increasing delusions, seeing hidden meanings in many things that convince him he is being plotted against-by such means as x-ray or hypnotism. Often, he feels he must defend himself by lawsuits or antisocial acts which may even include murder. Some paranoiacs are referred to as maniacs-for example, the pyromaniac who may set fire to buildings in order to destroy the" evil people" in them.

MANIC-DEPRESSIVE PSYCHOSIS

In this illness, there is alternating extreme moods-periods of mania, with grossly exaggerated feelings of well-being and elation, and supreme overconfidence; and periods of melancholia, with equally exaggerated feelings of misery during which a sense of profound, unjustified guilt may make the victim immobile. Normal people have ups and downs of mood. The changes may be rhythmical in nature, alternating from day to day, sometimes within the same day. But such mood variations are quite different from the wild elation and profound unhappiness of manic-depressive psychosis.