Delusion Definition and Types A delusion is an unshakeable belief (we cannot change it with logical explanations or evidence) that is held on inadequate grounds (they do not have a valid explanation or evidence for their belief, and that is not a conventional belief that the person might be expected to hold given their educational, cultural, and religious background.   Illusions are mostly but not always normal. Hallucinations are mostly but not always abnormal. But a delusion is something that is always abnormal. So, someone who believes to be possessed by the supernatural is not delusional because it’s a cultural common belief. In the west, many young girls become convinced that they need to be thin and take extreme measures, and their weight may reach life-threatening low levels and continue. And this is still not a delusion because they consider thinness socially desirable and they educate most people about the risks of obesity is dangerous and the need for thinness. Persecutory de

Loosening of Association A loss of the normal structure of thinking.  The patient’s discourse seems muddled and illogical and does not become clearer with further questioning; there is a lack of general clarity, and the interviewer has the experience that the more he/she tries to clarify the patient’s thinking, the less we understand it.   Loosening of associations occurs mostly in patients with schizophrenia. Earlier psychopathologists have described three kinds of loosening of association: Knight’s move thinking ( Derailment , Entgleisen ):  There is a change in the train of thought. There is retained but misled determining of the objective of thought. There is a disordered intermixture of constituent parts of one complex thought.  Talking past the point ( vorbeireden )  where the patient gets close to the point of discussion, but skirts around it and never actually reach it Verbigeration (word salad, schizophasia, paraphrasia)  where speech is reduced to a senseless repetition of so

Disorders of the Form of Thought Form of thought Form of thought is the way people experience or express thoughts and the way thoughts proceed one after the other irrespective of their quantity. It helps in the diagnosis of psychiatric disorders. Normal thinking forms include the following.  Dereistic Thinking (daydreams) Imaginative thinking Rational thinking Formal Thought Disorder The term ‘formal thought disorder’ is a synonym for disorders of conceptual or abstract thinking that are most seen in schizophrenia and organic brain disorders. In schizophrenia, disorders in the form of thinking may coexist with deficits in cognition, and these forms of thought disturbance may prove difficult to distinguish in certain cases. Cameron used the term ‘Asyndesis’ to describe the lack of adequate connections between successive thoughts. Cameron placed particular emphasis on ‘over-inclusion’, which is an inability to narrow down the operations of thinking and bring into action the organized att

  Psychopathology Psychopathology is a term which refers to either the study of mental illness or mental distress or to the manifestation of behaviours and experiences which may be indicative of mental illness or psychological impairment. Copyright Notice Adapted from Wikipedia. Text is available under the  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0 ; additional terms may apply.