Types
Diagnosis of a specific type of delusional disorder can sometimes be made based on the content of the delusions. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) enumerates seven types:
- Erotomanic type (erotomania): delusion that another person is in love with the individual, quite frequently a famous person. The individual may breach the law as he/she tries to obsessively make contact with the desired person.
- Grandiose type: delusion of inflated worth, power, knowledge, identity or believes himself/herself to be a famous person, claiming the actual person is an impostor or an impersonator.
- Jealous type: delusion that the individual's sexual partner is unfaithful when it is untrue. The patient may follow the partner, check text messages, emails, phone calls etc. in an attempt to find "evidence" of the infidelity.
- Persecutory type: This delusion is a common subtype. It includes the belief that the person (or someone to whom the person is close) is being malevolently treated in some way. The patient may believe that he/she has been drugged, spied-on, harassed and so on and may seek "justice" by making police reports, taking court action or even acting violently.
- Somatic type: delusions that the person has some physical defect or general medical condition
- Mixed type: delusions with characteristics of more than one of the above types but with no one theme predominating.
- Unspecified type: delusions that cannot be clearly determine or doesn't characterize in any of the categories in the specific types.
Read more about this topic: Delusional Disorder
Famous quotes containing the word types:
“... there are two types of happiness and I have chosen that of the murderers. For I am happy. There was a time when I thought I had reached the limit of distress. Beyond that limit, there is a sterile and magnificent happiness.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“Our major universities are now stuck with an army of pedestrian, toadying careerists, Fifties types who wave around Sixties banners to conceal their record of ruthless, beaverlike tunneling to the top.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“The American man is a very simple and cheap mechanism. The American woman I find a complicated and expensive one. Contrasts of feminine types are possible. I am not absolutely sure that there is more than one American man.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)