Weatherly's Woes - Psychosis

PSYCHOSIS

Psychosis is a generic psychiatric term for odd behavior that doesn’t align with reality. They often have trouble separating reality from things that aren’t real. Hallucinations are a great example of a psychotic symptom -- they can’t distinguish real sensory perceptions from false ones. Psychosis is often described as a “disorganized” pattern of speech, thought or behavior -- disorganized is a pretty meaningless term, but in this case, I think it accurately captures the wide spectrum of “odd” behaviors that fall into the psychosis universe. Psychosis can be a component of MANY different psychiatric illnesses, but the classic psychotic disease is Schizophrenia.

Brief Psychotic Disorder, Schizophreniform and Schizophrenia have the same symptoms. The difference is the TIMING.

SchizophreniFORm lasts about FOUR months

Delusional Disorder - these patients have ONLY ONE symptom -- a delusion -- lasting for at least a month. They’re completely normal in all other respects. For example, picture a woman who is convinced that her face was made of air. That’s a pretty bizarre example, as it’s more common to have non-bizarre delusions, like thinking the cashier at the Piggly Wiggly is in love with you. It’s one of only 2 DSM disorders where the patient is usually high functioning (the other being Bipolar 2).

Schizoaffective Disorder - Schizo means that they’re constantly psychotic. Affective means that their affect, aka mood, periodically gets depressed or manic.

MDD with Psychosis - They have a normal baseline, but when they get depressed, they get superimposed psychotic symptoms on top of their depression