Catatonia is a complex syndrome, most commonly seen in people with underlying mood or psychotic disorders. People with catatonia have abnormal movement and behaviors, which vary from person to person and fluctuate in intensity within a single episode. People with catatonia appear withdrawn, meaning that they do not interact with the outside world and have difficulty processing information. They may be nearly motionless for days on end or perform repetitive purposeless movements. Two people may exhibit very different sets of behaviors and both still be diagnosed with catatonia. Treatment with benzodiazepines or ECT are most effective and lead to remission of symptoms in most cases.
Psychosis is a condition of the mind or psyche that results in difficulties determining what is real and what is not real. Symptoms may include delusions and hallucinations, among other features. Additional symptoms are disorganized thinking and incoherent speech and behavior that is inappropriate for a given situation. There may also be sleep problems, social withdrawal, lack of motivation, and difficulties carrying out daily activities. Psychosis can have serious adverse outcomes.
Clanging is a symptom of mental disorders, primarily found in patients with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. This symptom is also referred to as association chaining, and sometimes, glossomania.
A communication disorder is any disorder that affects an individual's ability to comprehend, detect, or apply language and speech to engage in dialogue effectively with others. This also encompasses deficiencies in verbal and non-verbal communication styles. The delays and disorders can range from simple sound substitution to the inability to understand or use one's native language. This article covers subjects such as diagnosis, the DSM-IV, the DSM-V, and examples like sensory impairments, aphasia, learning disabilities, and speech disorders.
Schizoaffective disorder is a mental disorder characterized by symptoms of both schizophrenia (psychosis) and a mood disorder - either bipolar disorder or depression. The main diagnostic criterion is the presence of psychotic symptoms for at least two weeks without prominent mood symptoms. Common symptoms include hallucinations, delusions, disorganized speech and thinking, as well as mood episodes. Schizoaffective disorder can often be misdiagnosed when the correct diagnosis may be psychotic depression, bipolar I disorder, schizophreniform disorder, or schizophrenia. This is a problem as treatment and prognosis differ greatly for most of these diagnoses. Many people with schizoaffective disorder have other mental disorders including anxiety disorders.
A thought disorder (TD) is a disturbance in cognition which affects language, thought and communication. Psychiatric and psychological glossaries in 2015 and 2017 identified thought disorders as encompassing poverty of ideas, neologisms, paralogia, word salad, and delusions—all disturbances of thought content and form. Two specific terms have been suggested—content thought disorder (CTD) and formal thought disorder (FTD). CTD has been defined as a thought disturbance characterized by multiple fragmented delusions, and the term thought disorder is often used to refer to an FTD: a disruption of the form of thought. Also known as disorganized thinking, FTD results in disorganized speech and is recognized as a major feature of schizophrenia and other psychoses. Disorganized speech leads to an inference of disorganized thought. Thought disorders include derailment, pressured speech, poverty of speech, tangentiality, verbigeration, and thought blocking. One of the first known cases of thought disorders, or specifically OCD as it is known today, was in 1691. John Moore, who was a bishop, had a speech in front of Queen Mary II, about "religious melancholy."
In psychology, alogia is poor thinking inferred from speech and language usage. There may be a general lack of additional, unprompted content seen in normal speech, so replies to questions may be brief and concrete, with less spontaneous speech. This is termed poverty of speech or laconic speech. The amount of speech may be normal but conveys little information because it is vague, empty, stereotyped, overconcrete, overabstract, or repetitive. This is termed poverty of content or poverty of content of speech. Under Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms used in clinical research, thought blocking is considered a part of alogia, and so is increased latency in response.
The mental status examination (MSE) is an important part of the clinical assessment process in neurological and psychiatric practice. It is a structured way of observing and describing a patient's psychological functioning at a given point in time, under the domains of appearance, attitude, behavior, mood and affect, speech, thought process, thought content, perception, cognition, insight, and judgment. There are some minor variations in the subdivision of the MSE and the sequence and names of MSE domains.
Disorganized schizophrenia, or hebephrenia, is an obsolete term for a subtype of schizophrenia. It is no longer recognized as a separate condition, following the publication of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) in 2013, which dropped the concept of subtypes of schizophrenia, and global adoption of the (eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases in 2022. It was originally proposed by the German psychiatrist Ewald Hecker in the 1870s.
This glossary covers terms found in the psychiatric literature; the word origins are primarily Greek, but there are also Latin, French, German, and English terms. Many of these terms refer to expressions dating from the early days of psychiatry in Europe; some are deprecated, and thus are of historic interest.
Language disorders or language impairments are disorders that involve the processing of linguistic information. Problems that may be experienced can involve grammar, semantics (meaning), or other aspects of language. These problems may be receptive, expressive, or a combination of both. Examples include specific language impairment, better defined as developmental language disorder, or DLD, and aphasia, among others. Language disorders can affect both spoken and written language, and can also affect sign language; typically, all forms of language will be impaired.
In medicine, a prodrome is an early sign or symptom that often indicates the onset of a disease before more diagnostically specific signs and symptoms develop. More specifically, it refers to the period between the first recognition of a disease's symptom until it reaches its more severe form. It is derived from the Greek word prodromos, meaning "running before". Prodromes may be non-specific symptoms or, in a few instances, may clearly indicate a particular disease, such as the prodromal migraine aura.
Neurological disorders represent a complex array of medical conditions that fundamentally disrupt the functioning of the nervous system. These disorders affect the brain, spinal cord, and nerve networks, presenting unique diagnosis, treatment, and patient care challenges. At their core, they represent disruptions to the intricate communication systems within the nervous system, stemming from genetic predispositions, environmental factors, infections, structural abnormalities, or degenerative processes.
In psychiatry, derailment categorises any speech that sequences of unrelated or barely related ideas compose; the topic often changes from one sentence to another.
In psychology, logorrhea or logorrhoea is a communication disorder that causes excessive wordiness and repetitiveness, which can cause incoherency. Logorrhea is sometimes classified as a mental illness, though it is more commonly classified as a symptom of mental illness or brain injury. This ailment is often reported as a symptom of Wernicke's aphasia, where damage to the language processing center of the brain creates difficulty in self-centered speech.
Thought blocking is a neuropsychological symptom expressing a sudden and involuntary silence within a speech, and eventually an abrupt switch to another topic. Persons undergoing thought blocking may utter incomprehensible speech; they may also repeat words involuntarily or make up new words. The main causes of thought blocking are schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, petit mal seizures, post-traumatic stress disorder, bradyphrenia, aphasia, dementia and delirium.
Jargon aphasia is a type of fluent aphasia in which an individual's speech is incomprehensible, but appears to make sense to the individual. Persons experiencing this condition will either replace a desired word with another that sounds or looks like the original one, or has some other connection to it, or they will replace it with random sounds. Accordingly, persons with jargon aphasia often use neologisms, and may perseverate if they try to replace the words they can not find with sounds.
The Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms (SANS) is a rating scale that mental health professionals use to measure negative symptoms in schizophrenia. Negative symptoms are those conspicuous by their absence—lack of concern for one's appearance, and lack of language and communication skills, for example. Nancy Andreasen developed the scale and first published it in 1984. SANS splits assessment into five domains. Within each domain it rates separate symptoms from 0 (absent) to 5 (severe). The scale is closely linked to the Scale for the Assessment of Positive Symptoms (SAPS), which was published a few years later. These tools are available for clinicians and for research.
Within psychological testing, the Scale for the Assessment of Positive Symptoms (SAPS) is a rating scale to measure positive symptoms in schizophrenia. The scale was developed by Nancy Andreasen and was first published in 1984. SAPS is split into 4 domains, and within each domain separate symptoms are rated from 0 (absent) to 5 (severe). The scale is closely linked to the Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms (SANS) which was published a few years earlier.
In psychology, graphorrhea, or graphorrhoea, is a communication disorder expressed by excessive wordiness with minor or sometimes incoherent rambling, specifically in written work. Graphorrhea is most commonly associated with schizophrenia but can also result from several psychiatric and neurological disorders such as aphasia, thalamic lesions, temporal lobe epilepsy and mania. Some ramblings may follow some or all grammatical rules but still leave the reader confused and unsure about what the piece is about.
