What is psychosis?
Q: What is psychosis?
A: Psychosis is the name used in psychiatry for a some mental illnesses. People with psychosis are called psychotic and usually lose touch with reality, having trouble telling what is real and what is not. It is an extreme kind of altered state of consciousness.
Q: What does the word "psychosis" mean?
A: The word "psychosis" has two parts; the first part comes from psyche, which means soul in Ancient Greek, and the second part is the ending '-osis', which means illness or unnatural condition. So literally, psychosis means unnatural condition of the soul.
Q: What symptoms do people with psychosis experience?
A: People with psychosis may have hallucinations, which means they can experience things that are not really there. They may also have delusions, which are fixed beliefs and ideas that are usually false. Sometimes their personality changes, and they cannot think straight. Some of these thoughts may be paranoid. Not every psychotic person has all of these problems. Because of these, psychotics often act in strange ways, making it difficult for them to live a normal life as part of society.
Q: How common is psychosis?
A: About 1 percent of people suffer from psychosis during their lives.
Q: What can cause someone to seem psychotic?
A: Things that can make someone seem psychotic include poisons, drugs, diseases of the nervous system, and other illnesses.
Q: Are religious or supernatural experiences associated with psychosis?
A: Hallucinations connected to religion or supernatural experiences seem to be quite common but very often these experiences cannot be called psychosis in a medical sense of the word - some people believe that those who have suffered from what could be called psychosis may simply have had experiences that were very strong or distressing rather than being medically diagnosed as such .
Q: Is violence associated with psychosis?
A: In movies and media in general certain people who are shown as violent and antisocial are sometimes labelled psychotic but this image is wrong - most likely they would be psychopaths or sociopaths rather than having hallucinations or delusions due to actual mental illness like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder .
