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Psychiatry definitions

Terms in this set (100)

Torpidity
"Dullness". A deficiency in mental and physical alertness and activity. The patient does not perceive the stimuli of their environment properly, their mental functioning has slowed down.
Sopor
"deep sleep". A profound depression of consciousness, which is manifested by drowsiness, while maintaining coordinated defensive reactions to pain, and preserving vital functions
Estatic state/exaltation
An altered state of consciousness, characterized by an extreme state of euphoria and psychomotor agitation, accompanied by a lack of restraint. It tends to occur in manic episodes
"Loosened-up" consciousness
Verbal communication is possible with the patient, but they are "not present" in the situation, their speech is still organized, but there is no connection between the larger units of thoughts.
Disintegration of consciousness
The integration of mental processes is seriously damaged, the patient no longer presents a unified, predictible set of beliefs, attitudes, traits and behavioral responses.
Presuicidal syndrome
It consists of 3 principle components (Ringel's triad) ➔ (1) cognitive, emotional and social constriction (2) inhibited aggression turned toward the self and (3) suicidal fantasies
Explosive reaction
A sudden episode of impulsive, aggressive, violent behavior or angry verbal outburst in which the patient reacts grossly out of proportion to the situation.
Delirium
acute, organic, reversible syndrome characterized by a global disfunction of mental (cognitive + affective + conative) functions, including:
● confusion, disorientaion and impairment of consciousness
● inadequate, impulsive, violent behavior
● hallucinations or illusions
● disturbed sleep-wake cycle
● sympathicotonia
It is a life-threatening, emergency condition with a fluctuating course (changes within days or even hours!) and broad etiology.
Somatization
A tendency to experience and communicate psychological distress in the form of bodily and organic symptoms. These symptoms are not bizarre, but lack any organic background.
Coenesthesia, coenestopathy
Bizarre sensations arising from different parts of the body, that cannot be interpreted pathophysiologically. No organic causes can be detected in the background
Depersonalization
Feeling disconnected or detached form one's self. Individuals may report feeling as if they are an outside observer of their own thoughts or body, and often report feeling a loss of controll over their thoughts or actions.
Derealization
Sensation of changed reality or that one's surroundings have altered.
Illusion
Perceptual misinterpretation of a real external stimulus
Hallucination
False sensory perception occuring in the absence of any relevant external stimulus. It has all the properties of real perception, so it gives the full experience of reality. Types of hallucinations according to modality: visual, acoustic, olfactory, gustatory, tactile.
Pseudohallucination
A pathological perception that occurs without a detectable stimulus, which is recognised by the person experiencing it as being subjective and unreal
Pseudologia fantastica
A clinical syndrome characterized by elaborate fabrications, which are usually concocted to impress others, or to get out of an awkward situation. „Pathological lying
Confabulation
Production or creation of false memories to fill in missing memory traces, without the intent to deceive, sometimes called „honest lying". Seen in Korsakoff's syndrome.
Autopsychic disorientation
The individual is not able to tell their personal data (full name, date of birth, place, etc.)
Allopsychic disorientation
The individual is not able to recognize the environment, the situation (for example if they are at home or in a hospital, if they are talking to a doctor or a family member).
Delusional misidentification syndrome
The patient misindentifies familiar person, objects or self, and believe that they have been replaced or transformed. The misindentifications are false and are not correctable by experience or reason.
Examples:
● Capgras syndrome: the patient holds a delusion that their relative/friend has been replaced by an identical impostor.
● Fregoli syndrome: the patient believes that a certain person - usually persecutors following the patient - , repeatedly change their appearance and enters the patient's life as different-looking people.
Hypovigilant attention
Difficulty drawing the individual's awareness.
Hypervigilant attention
High responsiveness to stimuli, a constant scanning of the environment.
Hypotenax attention
The individual is unable to sustain goal-directed action.
Hypertenax attention
The attention is pathologically fixed on a specific stimulus.
Hypoprozex attention
The combination of a hypovigilant and hypertenax attention (difficult to arouse and easily fixed). Typically seen in depression.
Hyperprozex attention
The combination of a hypervigilant and hypotenax attention (easily aroused and hard to fix). Typically seen in mania.
Catathymic amnesia
An obsolete term for a form of amnesia in which there is loss of memory for a particular event; e.g., selective amnesia. Memory traces are distorted due to emotional impact.
Primary incoherence
The individual is not able to hold the goal concept, their thoughts are incoherent, fragmented, and lack any logical connections. A basic symptom of schizophrenia
Secondary incoherence
The reason of the incoherence is the acceleration of associations.
Typically seen in mania.
Logorrhoea
A tendency to extreme loquacity.
Mutism
The patient doesn't communicate verbally, despite their retained ability to speak.
Rumination
Excessive, repetitive thinking about the same event, which usually focuses on negative content, and results in emotional distress.
Verbigeration
Constant or obsessive repetition of meaningless words or phrases.
Neologism
A new word or phrase of the patient's own making often seen in schizophrenia.
Double bookkeeping
The tendency, among those who experience delusions, to perceive reality and the delusions as both being real, while remaining unbothered by the discrepancy or inconsistencies between the two. For example: the patient has a genealogical delusion of coming from a royal family, but at the same time they are willing to do any housework they are instructed to do.
Delusion (doxasma)
False belief, based on incorrect inference about external reality, that is firmly held despite objective and obvious contradictory proof or evidence and despite the fact that other members of the culture do not share the belief. Examples:
● ~ of persecution: false belief of being harassed or persecuted. The most common type.
● ~ of self-accusation: false feeling of remorse and guilt. Seen in depression with psychotic features.
● ~ of infidelity: false belief that ones lover is unfaithful
● ~ of reference: false belief that the behaviour of others refers to oneself or that events objects or other people have a particular and unusual significance, usually of a negative nature.
Types of delusions based on their logical aspect
organized delusions: every pathological perception is a well-constructed one
it becomes part of a system of delusions, contains hardly any self-contradictions, for the outsider
it seems very believable
● disorganized delusions: abnormal perceptions are not closely related
around a pathological thought, there are many self-contradictions, strikingly bizarre delusions
Types of delusions according to their relationship with mood
● holothyme: congruent with mood
● heterothyme: incongruent with mood
Types of delusions according to their reality content
● not bizarre: their content remains within the bounds of what is possible and imaginable, like being followed, poisoned, deceived, conspired against, or loved from a distance.
● bizarre: obviously absurd, far removed from reality, fantastic delusions, something that could never happen in real life, such as being cloned by aliens or having your thoughts broadcast on TV.
Egosystole
Narrowing of feeling, excessive negative self-evaluation.
Egodiastole
expansion of feeling, excessive positive self-evaluation.
Ekbom's syndrome: = delusional parasitosis
A belief that one's body is infested by invisible bugs. They usually report tactile hallucinations known as formication, a sensation resembling insects crawling on or under the skin.
Cleckley's psychopathic triad
It describes the 3 main characteristics of a psychopath: (1) inability to love and express other emotions (2) absence of nervousness (3) poor judgement and failure to learn from experience.
Blunted affect
decreased emotional response to surrounding events, For example, smiling or laughing at a good joke.
Anhedonia
Loss of interest in, and withdrawal from all pleasurable activities. Often associated with depression.
Irritability
Abnormal or excessive excitability, with easily triggered anger, annoyance or impatience
Emotional lability
Rapid, often exaggerated changes in mood, where strong emotions or feelings (uncontrollable laughing or crying, or heightened irritability or temper) occur.
Affect augmentation
Pathological emotional state that occurs following a minor emotional reaction, in which the patient indulges more and more intense ways.
Moria
"pathological giddiness". A mental state characterized by frivolity, joviality, and the inability to be serious.
Ambivalence
Coexistence of two opposing impulses toward the same thing in the same person at the same time. Seen in schizophrenia, borderline states, OCDs.
Alexithymia
Inability or difficulty in describing or being aware of one's emotions or moods (characteristic in psychosomatic disorders and alcohol use disorder).
Dysthymia
Negative change of mood.
Parathymia
An emotional disorder that's characterized by incongruity or inadequacy between affectivity and context.
Dysphoria
A sense of unease or bad general feeling.
Avolition
The decrease in the ability to initiate and persist in self-directed purposeful activities. The patient may have an urge to do something, but cannot realize the behaviour needed to complete that particular activity.
Abulia
Lack of motivation and initiation towards any activity. The person unconditionally accepts someone else's directions.
Ambitendency
The tendency to act in opposite ways, based on conflicting behavioural motivations.
Akathisia
Subjective feeling of motor restlessness manifested by a compelling need to be in constant movement accompanied with excessive anxiety; an extrapyramidal adverse effect of antipsychotic medication.
Tardive dyskinesia
Involuntary, repetitive body movements, which may include sticking the tongue out, grimacing, smacking of the lips, hand swinging. Side effect of antipsychotic medications.
Acute dystonia
An acute dystonic reaction is characterized by involuntary contractions of striated muscles accompanied by characteristic sensation of pain. Side effect of antipsychotic medications.
Agitation
Severe anxiety associated with motor restlessness, involving the possibility of turning into autoagressive or heteroagressive act.
Jactation
A tossing or shaking of the body. (e.g. the patient tosses him/herself in bed).
Perseveration
(1) Pathological repetition of the same response to different stimuli, as in a repetition of the same verbal response to different questions. (2) Persistent repetition of specific words or concepts in the process of speaking. Seen in cognitive disorders, schizophrenia, and other mental illness.
Echolalia
Repeating of words or phrases of one person by another; tends to be repetitive and persistent. Seen in certain kinds of schizophrenia, particularly in the catatonic type.
Echopraxia
The involuntary repetition or imitation of another person's actions.
Crystallization
Statue-like rigidness, a stereotypical body position.
Cerea flexibilitas (waxy flexibility)
The wax-like flexibility of limbs (we can set a pose and the patients remains in the same posture).
Negativism
Opposition or resistance to outside suggestions and advice; commonly seen in catatonic schizophrenia in which the patient resists any effort to be moved or does the opposite of what is asked. Passive negativism: resists an instruction. Active negativism: does the opposite of an instruction.
Obsession
Persistent and recurrent idea, thought, or impulse that cannot be eliminated from consciousness by logic or reasoning; obsessions are involuntary and ego-dystonic.
Compulsion
Pathological need to act on an impulse that, if resisted, produces anxiety; repetitive behaviour in response to an obsession or performed according to certain rules, with no true end in itself other than to prevent something from occurring in the future.
Catalepsy
Psychic inhibition of voluntary muscle movements.
Cataplexy
Affective attack of loss of muscle tones.
Catatonic excitement
Excited, uncontrolled motor activity not affected by exterior stimuli.
Catatonic stupor
Simultaneous occurrence of characteristic loss of reactivity towards outer stimuli and mutism.
Circumstantiality
Disturbance in the associative thought and speech processes in which a patient digresses into unnecessary details and inappropriate thoughts before communicating the central idea.
Tangentiality
Oblique, digressive, or even irrelevant manner of speech in which the central idea is not communicated.
Concretization
Loss of abstract thinking; the patient's thinking is characterized by actual things, events, and immediate experience, rather than by abstractions.
Conversion
The development of symbolic physical symptoms and distortions involving the voluntary muscles or special sense organs; not under voluntary control and not explained by any physical disorder. Most common in conversion disorder, but also seen in a variety of mental disorders.
Dissociation
Unconscious defence mechanism involving the segregation of any group of mental or behavioural processes from the rest of the person's psychic activity; may entail the separation of an idea from its accompanying emotional tone, thus protecting the person from the burdening exterior stimuli.
Induced paranoid disorder (shared psychosis, folie à deux)
People with emotional connection with the patient share the patient's symptoms/delusions.
Fugue
Dissociative disorder characterized by a period of almost complete amnesia, during which a person actually flees from an immediate life situation and begins a different life pattern; apart from the amnesia, mental faculties and skills are usually unimpaired.
Hypnagogic hallucination
Merging of dream and reality, hallucination occurring while falling asleep, not ordinarily considered pathological.
Hypnopompic hallucination
Merging of dream and reality, hallucination occurring while awakening from sleep, not ordinarily considered pathological.
Impulse control
Ability to resist an impulse, drive, or temptation to perform some action.
Psychosis
Loss of contact with reality (the adequate contact with reality). Severe disorders in perception and/or thinking, consequently in one's emotions and behaviour. The patient is not aware of their state.
Reality testing
Basic function in which the person can make a difference between their inner world and reality, can differentiate between the borders of the inner self and the outer world.
Regression
Unconscious defence mechanism in which a person undergoes a partial or total return to earlier patterns of adaptation.
Beck's cognitive triad
Negative thoughts regarding the world, the patient's own future and oneself.
Anosognosia
Inability to recognize one's illness.
Cognition
Mental process of knowing and becoming aware; includes psychic functions as perception, orientation, awareness, memory, thinking and intellect.
Megalomania
An obsession with grand schemes, the overemphasizing of one's own importance.
Deficit in mental development
Primary disorder of mental development which starts in childhood.
Dementia
The secondary loss of cognitive abilities (chronic, progressive deterioration of main cognitive domains).
Pseudodementia
Is a condition that appears similar to dementia but does have its roots in affective disorder (depression).
Impoverishment of speech
The amount of speech is limited; responses are short or single words.
Alogia
Inability to produce coherent thoughts.
Emotional constriction
Inability to feel any other emotion beside the currently experienced one. Part of presuicidal syndrome.
Cognitive constriction
The person's attention, memory and thinking centres on one singular issue/focus, from which the person cannot be diverted.
Psychomotor
Movements affected by psychic functions (mimic, pantomimic or posture), and qualitative and quantitative aspects of voluntary movements.
Anxiety
A negative emotion characterized by feelings of tension, worried anticipated thoughts, and physical changes like increased sympathetic activation, specific changes of psychomotor activity and cognitive changes. In itself it is not necessarily pathological. It is regarded as pathological if it is too intense, persistent or emerges in an inadequate situation, or the person lacks it entirely. Its effects can either be debilitating or facilitating.
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