People can have mental disorders {mental illness}.
types
Brain diseases and physical illnesses can cause mental disorders. Psychoses, neuroses, personality disorders, and mental retardation {functional disorder} can show no definite physical problem. People cannot simulate mental illness consistently.
causes
Family-member or other-loved-person loss, job loss, illness, or development changes can cause mental illness.
mental health
People can affect mental illness {mental health}. People can have ability to cooperate with others and have close, loving relationships. People can make sensitive critical appraisals of themselves and world. People can cope with everyday problems.
Healthy personality has the following traits: good self-concept, self-knowledge, strong self-attitudes, self-acceptance, reality sense, active involvement in society, no inferiority feelings, good sexual attitudes, independence, objectivity, low aggression, low submissiveness, ability to give and accept love, average competitiveness, and continuous growth.
incidence
0.05% of people have neuroses. Ten percent of doctor visits are mostly about mental problems. 10% of such patients go to psychiatrists. Psychiatric patients use nearly half of all hospital beds.
Mental states {aboulia} {abulia} can have little will and inability to make decisions, such as akinetic mutism.
Mental states {apathy}| can have little emotion, listlessness, self-preoccupation, and detachment from environment.
Damage in connections between visual and emotional centers can cause people to believe that imposters have replaced familiar people {Capgras syndrome} [Ramachandran, 2004].
People can feel that they are not perception agents {Cotard syndrome} {Cotard's syndrome}. They can feel that they are dead. They have no emotional responses to experiences.
Frustration can cause fixed and unusual beliefs {delusion}|. Delusions protect against anxiety by explaining away facts that cause anxiety. If someone challenges their delusions, people have small or inappropriate emotional responses. Delusions and hallucinations are major symptoms of several mental illnesses.
People can have perceptions like in dreams, in which everything is vague or unreal and familiar things have no meaning {derealization}|. People can feel either that they have been changed or that world is unreal. They can have unreal and strange feelings.
Destroying fibers connecting cerebral hemispheres {disconnection syndrome} can cause inability to understand written language {pure alexia} {pure word-blindness} {alexia without agraphia}, comprehend spoken language {pure word-deafness}, or write correct language {pure agraphia} without paralysis. People can be unable to make purposeful skilled movements {apraxia, disconnection} and to move in response to verbal commands, though they can comprehend words.
People can have two personalities, each with amnesia for the other {dissociative identity disorder} (DID).
Stress can initiate old stereotyped responses {fixation, obsession}|, such as obsessive or compulsive actions, to new stimuli.
People can believe that known people are impersonating other people {Fregoli phenomenon}.
Schizophrenia, dissociative identity disorder, and other diseases show abnormal identity experience {Ich-Störungen}.
People can like to hurt themselves {Lesch-Nyhan syndrome} [Ramachandran, 2004].
Severe mental illnesses {lunacy}| require intervention by society, which must infringe civil rights.
People can show uncontrolled excitement, feel self-important, have well-being and elation, be over-active, make grandiose pronouncements, and perform obsessive behaviors {mania}|. Mania is much less common than depression. Drugs that raise monoamine levels can cause mania.
Depressive illness {melancholia}| can include loss and guilt, and loss has symbolic significance.
Women can have sexual promiscuity {nymphomania}|.
People can have delusions {paranoia}| {paranoid state} of grandeur and/or persecution.
symptoms
They are suspicious, are highly sensitive, project fears, believe that their beliefs are correct and justified, and do not believe that they are ill. They attack people that they think persecute them, quarrel with neighbors, accuse people of trespassing, or accuse spouses of infidelity.
factors
Paranoics have no intellectual deficits, hallucinations, emotional withdrawal, or disrupted syntax.
causes
Paranoia is a disorder of self-esteem and stress. Narcissistic self-overestimation is a typical reaction to humiliation during infancy and childhood. Paranoic ideas and anxieties are impulse projections.
treatment
Paranoia is not treatable now.
comparisons
Artists, and political and religious leaders, can mimic paranoia.
Frontal-lobe damage can cause repeated behaviors {perseveration, behavior}|. Wisconsin card-sorting test diagnosis it.
People can be unable to resist compulsion, obsession, or phobia {psychasthenia}.
Personal behavior can violate group moral code {psychopathic personality}.
Organic diseases {psychosomatic disease}| can associate with psychological factors.
types
Psychosomatic diseases include psychosomatic atopic dermatitis, anorexia nervosa, bronchial asthma, essential hypertension, gastric and duodenal ulcer, myocardial infarction, and ulcerative colitis. Heart disease, cancer, gastro-intestinal-tract disease, pulmonary tuberculosis, suicide, and accidents can also be psychosomatic.
cause
Stress caused by confinement, restraint, and frustration can affect organs.
individual
No disease is distinctively psychosomatic. Psychosomatic disease is peculiar to each patient and re-occurs.
age
Psychosomatic disease symptoms begin before age six and are real physiological disturbances.
People can ignore other's feelings or treat people as objects or things {depersonalization reaction}|. They can feel identity loss and body separation. They can have out-of-body experiences. Depersonalization can happen in relaxed periods after intense excitement and danger.
Depersonalization causes loss of perspective of outside world {Angstvolle Ich-Auflösung} {ego-dissolution}.
People can have maladaptive, socially unacceptable, or personally distressing habits {neurosis}| {psychoneurosis}.
symptoms
Neurosis symptoms include avoidance of others, self-indulgence, turning against others, self-deprivation, and turning against self. Neurosis symptoms are similar to normal-people feelings and thoughts but stronger.
onset
People can learn neurotic behaviors in early childhood.
persistence
Neurosis resists modification through learning. It persists because it protects against overt or hidden anxiety.
gender
Women outnumber men neurotics two to one.
types
Neuroses include functional disorders, such as limb paralysis or erectile impotence. They include alcohol dependence, anxieties, compulsions, drug dependence, hysteria, obsessive-compulsive disorders, personality disorders, phobias, sexual deviations, and disorders specific to childhood and adolescence.
neurotic personality types
Neurotic personality types include abnormal, cyclothymic, hysterical, obsessional, paranoid, schizoid, sociopathic, and vulnerable. Abnormal personalities have overreactions to anxiety. Cyclothymic personalities alternate in energy level. Hysterical personalities use repression and dissociation, especially in classic conversion hysteria. Obsessional personalities have rigid mental structures, possibly defenses against strong instinctual drives. Paranoid personalities use projection in behavior and thinking. Schizoid personalities use different personalities to hide anxieties. Anxiety and frustration can cause sociopathic personalities, likely to harm others. Vulnerable personalities cannot cope with everyday stresses, feel inadequate, seek attention, and are histrionic.
The most common neurosis {anxiety reaction}| {anxiety state} involves acute fear, triggered by stimulus or conflict. People can have recurring or persistent fears or panic and have active autonomic nervous systems, with sweating, tremors, faintness, choking, breathlessness, and stomach queasiness.
Neurosis {character disorder} can involve behavior or personality alterations.
Neurosis {hysteria} {conversion reaction}| {conversion hysteria} can be defense against stress.
symptoms
Hysteria can involve speech abnormalities, multiple personalities, histrionic behaviors, attention-seeking behaviors, manipulative behaviors, flirtatious behaviors, little self-criticism, susceptibility to suggestion, paralyzed limbs, convulsions, sensation loss, blindness, ataxic gait, throat constriction, fugue, dissociation, twilight states, amnesias, and shallow and labile emotions.
brain
Two-thirds of hysteria patients have brain injury or neurological disease.
Neurosis {depression, psychology}| {depressive neurosis} {depressive reaction} {unipolar affective disorder} can involve hopelessness, helplessness, despair, suicidal ideas, feelings of no control, edginess, irritability, and guilt. People tire easily, have low concentration, have poor appetite, lose weight, have constipation, have low sex drive, have light non-REM sleep, have low interest in things, and have earlier, longer, and more intense first REM sleep.
drugs
Drugs that deplete brain-messenger monoamines can induce depression. Drugs that raise monoamine level relieve depression.
factors
Artificial light and sleep deprivation reduce depression.
cause
Death, divorce, and other losses often cause depression [Wolpert, 2001].
Neurosis {hypochondria}| {hypochondriacal reaction} can involve unreasonable worries about health.
Neurosis {neurasthenic reaction} {neurasthenia}| can involve nervousness, fatigue, weakness, and headache. Conflicts about masturbation, or inability to resolve doubt or uncertainty, can cause it.
Neurosis {thought disorder}| can involve delusion, dissociation, obsession, and phobia.
Neurosis {obsessive-compulsive reaction}| {obsessive-compulsive neurosis} can involve absurd-idea recurrence.
symptoms
It can have odd behavior impulses, like kleptomania, pyromania, and poriomania. It can have compulsion. It can have obsession. People can be overly conventional, conscientious, reliable, scrupulous, or punctual. They can think about harm, contamination, sex, and sin. They can think repetitively about abstract problems. They can continually manipulate words and numbers. They can have fears of harming someone. They can fear dirt contamination. They can continually wash hands or check water taps. They often recognize their fears are silly.
incidence
Obsessive-compulsive reaction is rare.
Mental states {compulsion}| can have uncontrollable desires to do odd behaviors.
Mental states {obsession}| can have fixed thoughts.
Compulsions {kleptomania}| can involve stealing.
Compulsions {poriomania} can have continual movement.
Compulsions {pyromania}| can have fire setting.
Specific emotional stimuli can cause habitual behaviors {repetition compulsion}.
People can have serious perception and thought disorders and so do not know reality {psychosis}|. Psychoses can be organic or functional. Severe mental illness is rare. Psychosis is equally frequent in both sexes. Psychoses can originate in childhood.
Psychosis {functional psychosis} can involve psychological factors with no obvious body or brain diseases, such as faulty interactions in family. Functional psychoses include schizophrenia, affective psychosis, manic-depressive psychosis, involutional melancholia, and paranoia. Biochemical brain changes can cause functional psychoses.
Functional psychosis {manic-depressive psychosis} {affective psychosis} {bipolar affective disorder}| can involve mood extremes: first, flighty ideas and wildness and then profound apathy, despair, and little control. Manic-depression can be hereditary but also happens to extroverts under stress. Difficult life, bereavement, and loss can cause manic-depression. 15% of manic-depressive people die by suicide. Lithium prevents relapses.
Loss, menopause, middle age, or morbid feelings can cause agitated depression and functional psychosis {involutional melancholia}.
Psychosis {organic psychosis} can result from brain degenerative structural changes. Organic psychoses include senile dementia, presenile dementia, arteriosclerotic dementia, and alcoholic dementia.
Adolescent or young adult males {sociopath}| {antisocial psychopath} can be unable to conform to society rules.
symptoms
They cannot tolerate minor frustrations. They cannot form stable human relationships. They do not learn from experiences. They act impulsively or recklessly. They feel predominantly inadequate, aggressive, or creative.
effect
They typically die from accidents, suicide, or alcoholism.
treatment
Treatment to learn rational judgment and gain will to control antisocial behavior can help sociopaths. Medical treatment is currently useless or unused. By middle life, many sociopaths have adapted to society, without medical treatment.
Functional psychosis {schizophrenia}| {dementia praecox} can have delusions, hallucinations, memory disturbances, ideas of reference, volition problem, and dementia. Schizophrenics think their minds and wills are not under their control. They think that thoughts are being put into, or removed from, their minds. They suspect that someone is hypnotizing them.
incidence
About 1% of people have schizophrenia. Incidence has been the same for 50 years.
recovery
Individual episodes typically end with previous-personality recovery. Recovered schizophrenics can relapse after contact with critical and involved relatives. 80% of schizophrenic patients recover from first attack. Only 50% remain healthy. 10% of schizophrenic patients are long-term hospital in-patients. People can improve even after years of hospitalization.
properties: 4 A's
Schizophrenia has autistic thinking, emotion ambivalence and withdrawal, apathy and low emotional level with affect lack, inappropriate emotions, and unconnected thought and words with association lack.
properties: behavior
Schizophrenia causes agitation. Schizophrenia can show low spontaneity, simple speech, and slow movement. Schizophrenics have abnormal eye movements. They change mental-function distribution between cerebral hemispheres. They have difficulty processing incoming information.
properties: emotion
Schizophrenics lose interest in, and respond unemotionally to, other people.
properties: memory
Schizophrenics can lose discussion point. Schizophrenia can lessen memory formation and problem solving.
properties: speech
Schizophrenia can involve unusual associations to words or questions, with rambling and incoherent answers.
properties: will
Schizophrenics lose energy and are apathetic.
types
Schizophrenia types are catatonic, childhood, hebephrenic, paranoid, pseudoneurotic, schizo-affective, and simple.
factors
Schizophrenia has same types and frequencies in all environments and cultures. Schizophrenia does not increase in wars or other catastrophes.
causes
Trauma or intense family pressure can cause schizophrenia. Schizophrenia can transmit genetically.
causes: theory
Both nature and nurture cause schizophrenia {diathesis stress model}.
biochemistry
Schizophrenia lowers glutamate and increases NAAG, kynurenic acid, and homocysteine, which all affect NMDA receptors. D-cycloserine, D-serine, and glycine stimulate NMDA receptors. D-amino acid oxidase catabolizes D-serine. Catechol-O-methyltransferase affects dopamine metabolism, mainly in prefrontal lobes. Dysbindin and neuregulin affect number of NMDA receptors.
biochemistry: dopamine
Excess dopamine causes more activity. Low dopamine causes low activity. In schizophrenics, amygdala contains abnormal dopamine quantities. Dopamine D1 receptors are in frontal lobes. Cortex and brainstem receptors differ. A dopamine receptor binds dopamine antagonist drugs. Amphetamines, apomorphine, clozapine, etomidate, ketamine, Levodopa, phencyclidine, and phenothiazines affect schizophrenia.
tests
Tests for actions are Tower of London and Wisconsin Card-Sorting tests.
Schizophrenics can have opposite ideas about same things {ambivalence}.
People can have intellectual deficits, hallucinations, emotional withdrawal, and disrupted syntax {autistic thinking}.
People can visualize images {hallucination, schizophrenia} as sensations {psychosensory hallucination} or thoughts {psychic hallucination}. Schizophrenics typically hear voices talking to or about them. People can hear sounds {outer voices} or internally hear {inner voices} insistent voices that seem to come from outside. They hear voices telling them what to do, commenting on or repeating their thoughts, discussing among themselves, or threatening to kill them. Voices can give commands {command hallucination}.
Schizophrenics can have delusions, hallucinations, and memory disturbances, and can attribute incorrect object characteristics {ideas of reference}.
Schizophrenics can have apathy, low emotion, or inappropriate emotions {lack of affect}.
Schizophrenics can lose coordination between different mental functions {splitting}, particularly between cognitive and emotional personality aspects.
Schizophrenics can feel that thoughts are not their own thoughts, but someone else put them in their minds or they are someone else's thoughts {thought insertion}.
Schizophrenics can have little will {volition problem}.
Schizophrenia {catatonic schizophrenia} can involve excitement and then stupor and immobility.
Schizophrenia {hebephrenic schizophrenia} can involve withdrawal, bizarre mannerisms, and personal neglect.
Schizophrenia {paranoid schizophrenia} can involve disrupted syntax, autistic thinking, hallucinations, and emotional withdrawal.
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Date Modified: 2022.0225