Psychosis: Understanding Types and Behavioral Symptoms

The Nature of Psychotic Processes

The essence of any psychotic process is the loss of contact with reality by the individual and their spatiotemporal location. It is produced by a serious overall personality disorder, known as a psychotic state, whose effects are represented by a lack of mental control over perception or reasoning and an impairment in the directionality of behavior.

Classification of Psychosis

The causes of psychosis have informed their division into two primary groups:

1. Organic Psychosis: These are disorders resulting from irreversible injuries to the nervous system, whether as a result of disease processes, trauma, etc. This does not exclude the fact that, in some cases, a reversible process may occur when psychosis is treated in time and is caused by malnutrition, infectious processes, or glandular disorders.
2. Functional Psychosis: These are predominantly psychological in origin, and their roots lie in serious conditions affecting the structural elements of identity and continuity within the individual's personality.

Characteristics of Psychotic Behavior

Autism and Withdrawal

Autism involves a withdrawal from reality and a retreat into fantasy or hallucinatory processes. This establishes a "block of reality," becoming distant due to the rupture of psychic awareness (allopsychic consciousness of the environment). Patients may even force reality to fit into psychotic delusions, sometimes causing surprise due to the complexity of the explanations given to "justify" their ideas. They therefore suffer sensory processing effects, though these generally remain intact.

Emotional Disturbance

In these states, emotional responses are disrupted and characterized by apathy, a lack of response to common emotional stimuli, and the consistent inhibition of expressed feelings. It even happens that such emotional displays are related to psychotic experiences. Moreover, there is an extreme polarization of emotion, most visible in manic-depressive processes in which the subject can be insensitive and undisturbed for long periods of time, while in others, they exacerbate their emotions (becoming irritated or aggravated).

Alteration of the Logic of Thought Processes

The loss of psychic self-consciousness (internal to the subject), detached from the spatial and temporal location of the psychotic state, fosters strange associations and the construction of speeches based on absurd reasoning.