Psychoses

Many so-called psychotics are likely to become incapacitated at one moment or another of their lives. This condition, which provokes immense human suffering, may lead to permanent reclusion in mental hospitals and at worst may induce criminal acts. Psychosis is a symptomatology in which the individual fails to discriminate between stimuli and information received from the external world and stimuli arising within himself. An imaginary process of reorganization of the world becomes the sole way to deal with conflict, accentuating the incapacity for corrective learning. This condition generates disorders of perception, of thinking, of consciousness, of affectivity and mood and of activity. Psychoses are of two types, based on the underlying physical disease: organic psychoses including brain tumours, senile dementia, and general panesis; and functional psychoses including schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis, and affective psychosis.

Psychosis accounts for 5 to 15% of the total admissions to mental hospitals; approximately half of these are people diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia, the major so-called functional psychosis. The majority of the remaining cases are due to a variety of organic psychoses, predominantly aged people suffering from senile or arteriosclerotic psychoses.