Psychopathology

Chapter 2

Psychopathology

5 topics

  1. 3Psychopathology: disturbances of consciousness, orientation, and psychomotor activity – characteristics and clinical conditionsHow consciousness can be lowered or altered, how orientation for time, place, person and situation is lost, and how movement and behaviour are increased, slowed or distorted, from agitation and stupor to catatonia and akathisia, with the conditions in which each is seen.
  2. 4Psychopathology: disturbances of emotions, volition, and drives – characteristics and clinical conditionsHow emotion, will and the basic drives go wrong. Mood and affect, depressed and elevated mood, anxiety, irritability, anhedonia and the abnormalities of affect; the loss, excess and splitting of volition; and the disturbances of appetite, sleep, sexual drive, impulse and aggression, each with the conditions in which it is seen.
  3. 5Psychopathology: disturbances of thought process – characteristics and clinical conditionsHow thinking is disturbed in its form, its possession and its content. The disorders of tempo, flow and connection that make up formal thought disorder, obsessions and compulsions, thought insertion, withdrawal and broadcasting, delusions and overvalued ideas, and Schneider's first-rank symptoms, with the conditions in which each is seen.
  4. 6Psychopathology: disturbances of perception, attention, and memory – characteristics and clinical conditionsHow perception, attention and memory fail. Sensory distortions, illusions and hallucinations by modality, pseudohallucinations, depersonalisation and derealisation; distractibility, poor concentration, hypervigilance and neglect; the kinds of amnesia, confabulation and the other paramnesias, and Korsakoff syndrome, with the conditions in which each is seen.
  5. 7Neurobiology and genetics of mental disordersWhat is known about the biology of mental disorders, from the models that tie biology to life events, through the neurotransmitter systems, the stress axis, development and the scanner, to the twin studies and genome-wide studies that show how heritable the disorders are and how much of their genetic risk they share.