Discuss the major features of psychotic disorders, distinguish between positive and negative symptoms, and include a description of the six types of delusions

What will be an ideal response?

Answer will include that a person who is psychotic undergoes striking changes in thinking, behavior, and emotion that reflect a loss of contact with shared views of reality. Positive symptoms, such as hallucinations and delusions, are excesses or exaggerations compared to normal behavior, while negative symptoms are absences or deficiencies compared to normal behavior, such as a lack of emotion or an inability to communicate verbally. Hallucinations are imaginary sensations, such as seeing, hearing, or smelling things that don't exist in the real world. The most common psychotic hallucination is hearing voices with people sometimes feeling "insects crawling under their skin," taste "poisons" in their food, or smell "gas" their "enemies" are using to "get" them. Sensory changes, such as anesthesia (numbness, or a loss of sensation) or extreme sensitivity to heat, cold, pain, or touch, can also
occur. People who suffer from delusions hold exaggerated false beliefs that they insist are true, regardless of how much the facts contradict them. Types of delusions include: (1) depressive delusions, in which people feel that they have committed horrible crimes or sinful deeds; (2) somatic delusions, such as believing your body is "rotting away"? (3) delusions of grandeur, in which people think they are extremely important; (4) delusions of influence, in which people feel they are being controlled or influenced by others or by unseen forces; (5) delusions of persecution, in which people believe that others are "out to get them"? and (6) delusions of reference, in which people give personal meaning to unrelated events, such as getting personal messages from TV commercials. During a psychotic episode, emotions are often severely disturbed. For instance, the psychotic person may be wildly elated or hyperemotional. But sometimes psychotic patients may be depressed or apathetic and display a lack of emotion, or flat affect, a condition in which the face is frozen in a blank expression. Brain images from psychotic patients with "frozen faces" reveal
that their brains process emotions abnormally. Similarly, a reduced capacity to communicate verbally is a nearly universal symptom of psychosis. In fact, psychotic speech can be so garbled and chaotic that it sometimes sounds like a "word salad." For this reason, psychotic symptoms are sometimes thought of as a primitive type of communication. That is, many patients may be using their actions to say "I need help" or "I can't handle it anymore." Major disturbances such as those just described, as well as added problems with thinking, memory, and attention, bring about personality disintegration and a break with reality. Personality disintegration occurs when a person's thoughts, actions, and emotions are no longer coordinated. When psychotic disturbances and a fragmented personality are evident for weeks or months, the person has suffered a psychosis.