Mental Health Guide: Understanding Disorders, Symptoms, and Treatments
Mental Illness
Any disturbance of thought, feeling, perception, behavior, and general adaptation to the environment due to a disorder of the brain’s operation. This disturbance may be due to multiple causes.
Base
An alteration of thought.
Causes
- Injury
- Environmental factors
- Substance use
- …and more
Manifestations
- Inability to recognize reality
- Unusual behavior from a statistical point of view
- Deviant behaviors considered socially unacceptable
- Undesirable or obnoxious behaviors or thoughts
Duration
Serious mental illnesses are characterized by their permanence over time.
Mental Illness Categories
- Disorders of onset in infancy, childhood, or adolescence
- Delirium, dementia, amnesic disorders, and other cognitive disorders
- Mental disorders due to medical illness
- Substance-related disorders
- Schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders
- Mood disorders
- Anxiety, somatoform, factitious, dissociative, sexual, eating behavior, sleep, impulse control disorders not elsewhere classified
- Adaptive disorders
- Personality disorders
- Other problems
Alzheimer’s Disease
Characterized by a progressive loss of cognitive function, memory impairment, and emotional changes. Treatment usually involves medication, preventing complications (including family counseling), cognitive stimulation, and training in activities of daily living (ADL), especially in the early stages.
Schizophrenia
Usually occurs in late adolescence or the third decade of life. Psychotic symptoms last six months or more and include:
- Delusions (bizarre, paranoid, jealousy, somatic, grandiose, religious, nihilistic, or other)
- Auditory hallucinations, often including one or more voices commenting about the patient
- Incoherence
- Marked loss of associations
- Illogical thinking
- Inappropriate affect
- Disorganized or catatonic behavior
Patients with psychosis have undisturbed primary memory, calculation functions, and language. However, the emergence of an outrageous thought can contaminate or even prevent proper cognitive assessment.
Treatment
Acute psychotic patients, especially those suffering from violent “imperative hallucinations,” can be dangerous to themselves and others. These patients need psychiatric hospitalization. Antipsychotic medications are generally very effective in improving hallucinations and agitation but are less effective in treating social withdrawal and anhedonia.
Pharmacotherapy
- Antipsychotics: Reduce psychotic symptoms and protect against future outbreaks.
- Antidepressants: Relieve symptoms of depression and improve anxiety.
- Tranquilizers: Produce relaxation and reduce anxiety.
- Lithium: Stabilizes mood, soothes, and protects against future episodes of mania and depression.
Hospitalization
Short Stay
Mental illness has many cycles that appear as acute outbreaks or crises in which the disease manifests itself most clearly. These processes are expected in the family or people living with patients whose symptoms are pain, psychological distress, etc.
Medium or Long Stay
Provides psychiatric care to adults affected by chronic mental disorders requiring medical monitoring but not permanent intensive psychiatric care.
Psychological Care
The treatment of mental health problems through dialogue and therapeutic counseling.
Family Care
Patients require significant family support to provide emotional, physical, and economic assistance. This support will largely depend on the type and severity of the disorder, especially when the family makes up the institution.
Anxiety Disorders
These disorders interfere with the person’s normal activity but do not completely disable them. Individuals are aware of their problems and do not experience a break from reality.
Generalized Anxiety
The most diffuse and durable form of neurosis. It is a situation of discomfort and constant vague anxiety that cannot be attributed to any specific situation, accompanied by physical symptoms.
Panic Disorder
Repeated attacks of terror accompanied by physical symptoms, lasting a few minutes.
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
Obsessions are persistent ideas, impulses, or images that continuously appear in the subject’s consciousness against their will.
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
A condition that arises when a person has experienced or witnessed a traumatic event that caused horror, panic, or excessive fear and that is intensely and persistently relived.
Phobias
Irrational, disproportionate, and irrepressible fears of certain objects or situations.
Severe Emotional Disorders
Diseases that profoundly affect the mood of some people, interfering with daily functioning in a very serious way.
Depression
A mental state characterized by excessive sadness that entails an alteration of affectivity. It is not just sadness but the difficulty of transmitting or receiving affection.
Dementia
A group of mental disorders with varied causes, symptoms, and courses, characterized by impaired memory, thinking, emotions, and behavior, affecting the subject’s normal functioning.