Posted by banga on January 8, 2005, at 19:31:25
In reply to Depressive or non-depressive delusions, posted by pretty_paints on January 8, 2005, at 12:08:57
I'm not sure if your question derived from my comment on hallucinations/delusions being mood-consistent or not....
Mind you, what I write here is what I was initially taught in school, and as we know reality is not as clear-cut as we are taught. But here is goes:
Psychosis associated with mood disorder is going to be usually an extreme extension of the particular emotions. When we are depressed, we typically feel worthless and hopeless right? And usually very very bad about ourselves. Well, take it to a deeper step --for instance, not only do you FEEL like you are bad, you entirely BELIEVE you are bad in some way. Or that you are rotting from the inside and you can smell it. So you are SO depressed that you begin to lose contact with reality and your feelings about yourself become your beliefs about yourself. Along the same lines, for mania, you not only feel and act like you are invincible, you may at the extreme lose touch with reality and adopt a title that proves you are invincible--for instance you are God or DaVinci. The thought then is is that the delusion, hallucination or experience is created by a mood becoming so extreme you lose touch with reality--and the psychosis fits the mood you are in.A person with schizophrenia could have the same type of hallucinations or delusions, but they may or may not experience extreme moods during that time that fit with the thoughts, experiences and beliefs. You could have schizophrenia, have hallucinations and other experiences come and go, they may or may not upset you...they are not necesarily experiencing the mood that would make sense according to the delusion.
Sorry this is so jumbled--but that's the point. It can be very difficult to sort out. This is a pollyanna version where everything happens like it does in the textbook. I am sure people who have a thought disorder would say this is a really simplistic version of the difference.
The diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder was set up to help understand the people whose difficulties could not be fully captured by a sole diagnosis of mood disorder or thought disorder.
Things can vary across borders too. In Europe especially, people with psychosis are more often diagnosed as having schizophrenia, when in the US they would get the diagnosis of Bipolar I. This happened to my cousin--she was diagnosed as schizophrenia in Europe (she had a breakdown, in which at the highest point she believed she was Jesus), but when she came back to the States they switched her diagnosis to Bipolar, which seemed at least to my estimation fit much more accurately.
poster:banga
thread:439403
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20050108/msgs/439552.html