Delusion
Clinic
- It is an entity, means having a false fixed belief that is not changed in by nay evidence.
- Along with Altered pattern of thought, they are Thought entities. Delusion is disturbances of thought content and Altered pattern is disturbances of pattern of thinking.
- As a pathology, it is distinct from a belief based on false or incomplete information, confabulation, dogma, illusion, hallucination, or some other misleading effects of perception, as individuals with those beliefs are able to change or readjust their beliefs upon reviewing the evidence. However:
"The distinction between a delusion and a strongly held idea is sometimes difficult to make and depends in part on the degree of conviction with which the belief is held despite clear or reasonable contradictory evidence regarding its veracity."
- Here I claim that Delusion is a sign of Psychosis.
- Note that ... it means that there maybe some patients who have delusions but not have psychosis. Since for labeling psychosis, the patient must have Delusion and
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Types
Delusions are categorized into four different groups:
- Bizarre delusion: Delusions are deemed bizarre if they are clearly implausible and not understandable to same-culture peers and do not derive from ordinary life experiences. An example named by the DSM-5 is a belief that someone replaced all of one's internal organs with someone else's without leaving a scar, depending on the organ in question.
- Non-bizarre delusion: A delusion that, though false, is at least technically possible, e.g., the affected person mistakenly believes that they are under constant police surveillance.
- Mood-congruent delusion: Any delusion with content consistent with either a depressive or manic state, e.g., a depressed person believes that news anchors on television highly disapprove of them, or a person in a manic state might believe they are a powerful deity.
- Mood-neutral delusion: A delusion that does not relate to the patient's emotional state; for example, a belief that an extra limb is growing out of the back of one's head is neutral to either depression or mania.
Themes
In addition to these categories, delusions often manifest according to a consistent theme. Although delusions can have any theme, certain themes are more common. Some of the more common delusion themes are:
Types
Subtypes | Definition | Rubrics |
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Grandiose delusions |
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Persecutory delusions |
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Nihilistic delusion |
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Somatic /Hypochondriacal delusion | He believes that he has a physical defect or medical problem.
Usually the false belief is that the body is somehow diseased, abnormal, or changed. An example of a somatic delusion would be a person who believes that his or her body is infested with parasites. |
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Erotomania | False belief that another person is in love with them. | |
Delusion of reference | False belief that insignificant remarks, events, or objects in one's environment have personal meaning or significance. "Usually the meaning assigned to these events is negative, but the 'messages' can also have a grandiose quality." | |
Delusion of Poverty |
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Delusion of Thought |
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Delusion of Guilt /Sin/ Self-accusation | Ungrounded feeling of remorse or guilt of delusional intensity |
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Delusion of Infidelity / Jealousy | He believes that his spouse or lover is having an affair and believes that his sexual partner is unfaithful. The patient may follow the partner; check text messages, emails, phone calls etc. in an attempt to find “evidence” of the infidelity. |
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Pathophysiology
The two-factor model of delusions posits that dysfunction in both belief formation systems and belief evaluation systems are necessary for delusions. Dysfunction in evaluations systems localized to the right lateral prefrontal cortex, regardless of delusion content, is supported by neuroimaging studies and is congruent with its role in conflict monitoring in healthy persons. Abnormal activation and reduced volume is seen in people with delusions, as well as in disorders associated with delusions such as frontotemporal dementia, psychosis and Lewy body dementia. Furthermore, lesions to this region are associated with "jumping to conclusions", damage to this region is associated with post-stroke delusions, and hypometabolism this region associated with caudate strokes presenting with delusions
The aberrant salience model suggests that delusions are a result of people assigning excessive importance to irrelevant stimuli. In support of this hypothesis, regions normally associated with the salience network demonstrate reduced grey matter in people with delusions, and the neurotransmitter dopamine, which is widely implicated in salience processing, is also widely implicated in psychotic disorders.[citation needed]
Specific regions have been associated with specific types of delusions. The volume of the hippocampus and parahippocampus is related to paranoid delusions in Alzheimer's disease, and has been reported to be abnormal post mortem in one person with delusions. Capgras delusions have been associated with occipito-temporal damage and may be related to failure to elicit normal emotions or memories in response to faces.