In the last post we covered MDD and we introduced the specifiers. In this post I will talk about MDD with psychotic features.
You may have guessed already, but what separates this disorder from MDD is the presence of delusions, and hallucinations along with symptoms of major depression. Fairly simple, right?
First, we need to define psychotic symptoms.
In general, we can think about the following symptoms:
- Delusions: which can be defined as fixed false beliefs. Something that the person believes despite evidence to the contrary.
- Hallucinations: A hallucination is a sensory perception in the absence of external stimuli. There are several types including auditory (most common, consists of hearing a voice or several voices), visual, olfactory (smell), tactile (touch), and gustatory (taste).
- Disorganized speech or behavior: This is an indication of the persons thought process. If the person is not thinking in a clear logical manner their though process may be difficult or impossible to follow for an outside observer.
These psychotic symptoms can be congruent with the depressed mood (content is consistent with depressive thoughts) or mood incongruent (content is not consistent with typical depressive thoughts). Mood congruent psychotic symptoms will consist of depressive themes such as guilt, death, poor self-worth, and punishment. Mood incongruent symptoms include things such as delusions of control, thought broadcasting, or thought insertion. Both mood congruent and incongruent themes can occur in the same episode.
Another key point is the psychotic symptoms only occur during a depressive episode. They are not present when the patient is not depressed. Once psychotic symptoms appear with an episode of depression, they tend to be present on subsequent episodes.
In the next post we will cover atypical features of depression. Please like, comment, and share the content. Feel free to offer suggestions for future posts.
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