Mental Health Terms

Affect

an immediately expressed and observed emotion; a feeling becomes an affect when observable.  The normal expression of affect involves variability in facial expression, pitch of voice, and the use of hand and body movements.

Inappropriate affect

 show completely opposite emotion from what say (schizophrenia) ex: talk about mother dying while smiling.

Flat affect

blank, masklike facial expression, devoid of emotion.

Blunt affect

variation of flat.  Is appropriate but lacks intensity.

Agitated

a state of anxiety associated with severe motor restlessness.

Akathesia

a state of motor restlessness, commonly seen as a side effect of antipsychotic drugs.

Anhedonia

loss of pleasure

Ambivalence

experience two opposite feelings at once.

Autistic

refers to modes of behavior in which the patient disregards his

 environment and focuses his attention and interest on himself.

Autistic thinking

private rules of reasoning and logic that don’t make

 sense in the real world.

Blocking

thought processes stop for emotional reasons.

Catatonic

a state of stupor with alterations in motor functioning (muscular rigidity and immobility) usually associated with schizophrenia, but is also seen in certain neurological conditions.

Compulsion

an uncontrolled persistent urge to perform an act repetitively in an attempt to relieve anxiety.

Concrete thinking

lack of ability to think in the abstract.  Difficult to understand concepts behind humor, stories, inferences.  Interpret, “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”

Confabulation

unconscious filling in of gaps in memory with fabricated facts and information.

Defense Mechanisms

aspects of one’s personality (specifically of the ego) that help combat specific uncomfortable or unwanted feelings . . . to relieve anxiety, restore equilibrium, and resolve conflicts.

Delirium

a reversible, acute organic brain syndrome

Delusion

a false belief neither based on reality, nor culturally derived,

 and not altered by reasonable evidence to the contrary.

 Persecutory

a delusion in which the central theme is that a person or group is being attacked, harassed, cheated, persecuted, or conspired against.

 Grandiosity

a delusion whose content involves an exaggerated sense of one’s importance, power, knowledge, or identity.

 Reference

a delusion whose theme is that events, objects, or other people in the person’s immediate environment have a particular and unusual significance, usually of a negative nature (ex:- a woman was convinced that programs on the radio were directed especially to her, when recipes were broadcast, it was to tell her to prepare wholesome food for her child and stop feeding her candy).

 Somatic

a delusion whose main content pertains to the functioning

of one’s body (Ex. One’s brain is rotting or one is pregnant, despite being post-menopausal).

 Thought broadcasting

the delusion that one’s thoughts are being broadcasted so others can hear them without action on his or her part to convey the thoughts, commonly of sexual connotation.

Thought Insertion or Withdrawal

a delusion that thoughts are being put in one’s mind or taken away from by either animate or inanimate objects, commonly of religious origin.

Dementia

an irreversible loss of cognitive functioning or chronic organic brain syndrome (OBS), often manifesting as a memory impairment.

Depression

a mental state of sadness, low self-esteem, and self                 

  reproach

Fidgety

make unnecessary movements; to act or move restlessly or nervously.

Flight of Ideas

The thoughts come so quickly and bring so many associations that no single thought can be clearly expressed.  The person’s ideas occur in rapid and endless variety, with only a single, slim thread connecting them.

Formication

the feeling that insects are crawling on your skin.  It is a

 type of hallucination caused by cocaine and delirium tremors.

 Id

aggressive and sexual drive

 Ego

the moderator between the id and superego

Superego

conscience, is critical and censoring

Hallucination

the perception of a sensory stimulus in the absence of any sensory stimulus that occurs while awake.  Hallucinations come in all sensory varieties.

Auditory

a hallucination of sound, most commonly voices, but sometimes clicks, music, etc

 Olfactory

a hallucination involving smell (ex: a woman c/o a persistent smell of dead bodies)

Tactile

a hallucination involving the sense of touch, often of something on or under the skin (ex: a man said he could feel someone putting pins into his flesh)

Visual

a hallucination involving sight, which may consist of formed images, such as people, or of unformed images, such as flashes of light.

Gustatory

a hallucination of taste, unpleasant tastes being the most common.

 Irrational

lacking usual or normal mental clarity or understanding.

 Illusion

this is the misperception of a sensory stimulus

Loose Associations

refers to a process of thinking in which ideas in the stream of thought have no relation to each other, “Star Trek is my favorite TV program, I like Spock the best, the traffic lights are red and green and amber is in the middle, and Pegasus was a flying horse.”  Is an example of loose associations from a young schizophrenic patient.

Magical thinking

belief that one’s thoughts control a situation (normal in children until they develop abstract thought but abnormal in adults)

Mania

a mood characterized by elation and increased activity.

Mood

feelings that are experienced internally.  The external expression of the feeling (as seen by others) is termed affect.

Neurosis

describing ineffective coping with stress that causes mild interpersonal disorganization.

Obsession

a persistent idea, thought, or impulse that cannot be eliminated from consciousness by logical effort.

Organic Brain Syndrome (OBS)

a mental condition in which disorientation and memory impairment are caused by organic (physical) factors.

Orientation

understanding one’s environment, in terms of person, place, and time.

Paranoia

a delusional feeling that people are out to get you.

Phobia

an intense fear of some situation not ordinarily associated with danger.  The phobia causes the person to avoid the situation.

Psychosis

person is out of touch with reality and has severe personality deterioration, impaired perception and judgment, hallucinations, and delusions.

 Schizophrenia

a mental illness causing hallucinations, delusions, and loose associations.

Worthlessness

global feeling of useless moral or personal value