A disorder characterized by
eccentric behaviour and
anomalies
of thinking and affect which
resemble those seen in schizophrenia, though no definite and
characteristic schizophrenic anomalies occur at any stage. The symptoms
may include:
A pervasive
pattern of social and interpersonal deficits marked by acute
discomfort with, and reduced capacity for, close relationships
as well as by cognitive or
perceptual distortions
and
eccentricities of behavior, beginning by early adulthood and
present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by five (or more)
of the following:
odd beliefs or magical
thinking that influences behavior and is inconsistent with
subcultural norms (e.g., superstitiousness, belief in clairvoyance,
telepathy, or "sixth sense"; in children and adolescents,
bizarre fantasies or
preoccupations);
unusual perceptual experiences, including bodily
illusions;
odd
thinking and speech (e.g., vague, circumstantial, metaphorical,
overelaborate, or stereotyped)
behavior or appearance that is odd,
eccentric, or
peculiar;
lack of close friends or confidants other than
first-degree relatives;
excessive social anxiety that does not diminish with
familiarity and tends to be associated with
paranoid fears rather than negative judgments about self.
Psychologist Dr. David
Weeks mentions people with a mental illness "suffer" from their behavior
while healthy eccentrics are quite happy.He even states
eccentrics are less prone to mental illness than everyone else.
According to studies, there are fifteen distinctive characteristics that
differentiate a healthy eccentric person from a regular person or
someone who has a mental illness (although some may not always apply).
The first five are in most people regarded as eccentric:
Nonconforming attitude, creative, intense curiosity,
idealistic, happy obsession with a hobby or hobbies, known very early in
his or her childhood they were different from others, highly
intelligent, opinionated and outspoken, noncompetitive, unusual living
or eating habits, not interested in the opinions or company of others,
mischievous sense of humor, single, eldest or only child, bad speller.
(usually uncommon).
A restricted or constricted affect describes a mild
restriction in the range or intensity of display of feelings. As the
reduction in display of emotion becomes more severe, the term blunted
affect may be applied. The absence of any exhibition of emotions is
described as flat affect where the voice is monotone, the face
expressionless, and the body immobile.
In psychiatry, thought disorder or formal thought disorder
is a term used to describe a pattern of disordered language use that is
presumed to reflect disordered thinking. It is usually considered a
symptom of
psychotic mental illness, although it occasionally appears in other
conditions. It describes a persistent underlying disturbance to
conscious thought and is classified largely by its effects on
speech and
writing.
Affected persons may show pressure of speech (speaking incessantly and
quickly), derailment or flight of ideas (switching topic mid-sentence or
inappropriately), thought blocking,
rhyming,
punning, or 'word
salad' when individual words may be intact but speech is incoherent.
Eugen Bleuler, who named
schizophrenia, held that its defining characteristic was a disorder
of the thinking process.
It is important to note however that the
delusions and
hallucinations of
psychosis could also be considered as disorders of thought, but that
the term formal thought disorder applies specifically to the
presumed disruption in the flow of conscious verbal thought that is
inferred from spoken language. This is typically what is referred to
when the strictly less accurate, more commonly used but abbreviated
term, 'thought disorder', is used.
Depersonalization
is an 'alteration' in the perception or experience of the self so that
one feels 'detached' from, and as if one is an 'outside' observer of,
one's mental processes or body. A feeling of watching oneself act, while
having no control over a situation. It can be considered desirable, such
as in the use of recreational drugs, but it usually refers to the severe
form found in anxiety and, in the most intense case, panic attacks. A
sufferer feels that he or she has changed and the world has become less
real, vague, dreamlike, or lacking in significance. It can sometimes be
a rather disturbing experience, since many feel that indeed, they are
living in a "dream."
Derealization
is an alteration in the perception or experience of the external world
so that it seems strange or unreal. Other symptoms are feeling as though
one's environment is lacking in spontaneity, emotional colouring and
depth. It is a dissociative symptom of many conditions, such as
psychiatric and neurological disorders, and not a standalone disorder.
Transience means passing with time. Something which has the property
of transience is said to be transient, or often simply a transient or
transient state.
Patients suffering from psychosis have impaired reality testing;
that is, they are unable to distinguish personal, subjective experience
from the reality of the external world. They experience hallucinations
and/or delusions that they believe are real, and may behave and
communicate in an inappropriate and incoherent fashion.
An illusion is a distortion of the senses, revealing
how the brain normally organizes and interprets sensory stimulation.
While illusions distort reality, they are generally shared by most
people.Illusions may occur with more of the human senses than vision,
but visual illusions, optical illusions, are the most well known and
understood.
The term illusion refers to a
specific form of sensory distortion. Unlike a hallucination, which is a
distortion in the absence of a stimulus, an illusion describes a
misinterpretation of a true sensation. For example, hearing voices
regardless of the environment would be a hallucination, whereas hearing
voices in the sound of running water (or other auditory source) would be
an illusion.
A hallucination, in the broadest sense, is a
perception in the absence of a stimulus. In a stricter sense,
hallucinations are defined as perceptions in a conscious and awake state
in the absence of external stimuli which have qualities of real
perception, in that they are vivid, substantial, and located in external
objective space. These definitions distinguish hallucinations from the
related phenomena of dreaming, which does not involve consciousness;
illusion, which involves distorted or misinterpreted real perception;
imagery, which does not mimic real perception and is under voluntary
control; and pseudohallucination, which does not mimic real perception,
but is not under voluntary control. Hallucinations also differ
from "delusional perceptions", in which a correctly sensed and
interpreted genuine perception is given some additional (and typically
bizarre) significance.
Hallucinations may occur
in any sensory modality — visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory,
tactile, proprioceptive, equilibrioceptive, nociceptive, and
thermoceptive.
A mild form of hallucination is known as a
disturbance, and can occur in any of the senses above. These may be
things like seeing movement in peripheral vision, or hearing faint
noises and voices.
A delusion is commonly defined as a fixed false
belief and is used in everyday language to describe a belief that is
either false, fanciful or derived from deception. In psychiatry, the
definition is necessarily more precise and implies that the belief is
pathological (the result of an illness or illness process). As a
pathology it is distinct from a belief based on false or incomplete
information or certain effects of perception which would more properly
be termed an apperception or illusion.
Although
non-specific concepts of madness have been around for several thousand
years, the psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers was the first to
define the three main criteria for a belief to be considered delusional
in his book General Psychopathology. These criteria are:
* certainty (held with absolute conviction)
* incorrigibility (not changeable by compelling counterargument or proof
to the contrary)
* impossibility or falsity of content (implausible, bizarre or patently
untrue)
These criteria still continue in modern psychiatric diagnosis. In the
most recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a
delusion is defined as:)
A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that
is firmly sustained despite what almost everybody else believes and
despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence
to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other
members of the person's culture or subculture (e.g., it is not an
article of religious faith).
There is some controversy over this definition, as 'despite what almost
everybody else believes' implies that a person who believes something
most others do not is a candidate for delusional thought.
Ideas of reference involve the belief that casual
events, people's remarks, etc., are referring to oneself when in fact
they are not. For example, a man reading a newspaper could incorrectly
interpret a story to be about himself, or a woman might believe people
were laughing at her when, in fact, they were laughing at a joke someone
told. If ideas of reference reach the point of strongly held beliefs or
cause impairment of functioning, they become Delusions of Reference.
Delusions of reference refers to the strongly held
belief that random events, objects, behaviors of others, etc., have a
particular and unusual significance to oneself. For example, a person
might believe that secret messages about him are broadcast in a weekly
television show, to the point where he would record the programs and
watch them again and again. When less firmly held or organized, these
beliefs are called Ideas of Reference.
In anthropology, psychology, and cognitive science,
magical thinking is nonscientific causal reasoning that often includes
such ideas as the ability of the mind to affect the physical world,
correlation equaling causation, the law of contagion, the power of
symbols, and the meaningfulness of synchronicity.
Magical thinking can occur when one simply does not understand possible
causes, as illustrated by Sir Arthur C. Clarke's suggestion that "any
sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" (see
Clarke's three laws), but can also occur in response to situations that
are largely random or chaotic, such as a coin toss, as well as in
situations that one has little or no control over, especially those one
is emotionally invested in. (Indeed, this can be seen as a special case
of failure to understand possible causes: specifically, a failure to
understand the laws of probability that guarantee the occurrence of
coincidences and seeming patterns.)
