Symptoms
Currently, PMD is considered a severe form of major depression, but patients with mild or moderate depression may still have psychotic features. Many people with PMD experience delusions, which are beliefs or feelings that are untrue or unsupported; these are usually misinterpretations of events or phenomena. Paranoid delusions or delusions of guilt may be the most common psychotic symptoms in PMD. Patients with PMD often have concerns that people are paying special attention to them or are trying to persecute them. Patients who experience delusional guilt may believe that they are being punished for past misdeeds or are responsible for problems they couldn’t possibly be responsible for.
Other common delusions include those in which people are concerned that something is terribly wrong with their bodies and physical health, when actually there isn’t anything wrong. Unlike other psychotic disorders, the delusions in PMD may not be very obvious. Delusions appear to be more common than hallucinations in PMD, but some people with PMD do hallucinate, or see or hear things that others do not. Auditory hallucinations (sounds) are perhaps the most common hallucinations seen in PMD. While other patients may report seeing, touching or smelling things that are not there, it is less common.
Other symptoms that are common in PMD are agitation, difficulty falling asleep, and frequent waking during the night. In addition, patients with PMD may have a greater suicide risk than patients with NPMD. Finally, those with PMD may have greater cognitive deficits (e.g., memory problems) than those with NPMD.
Read more about this topic: Psychotic Depression
Famous quotes containing the word symptoms:
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)
“A certain kind of rich man afflicted with the symptoms of moral dandyism sooner or later comes to the conclusion that it isn’t enough merely to make money. He feels obliged to hold views, to espouse causes and elect Presidents, to explain to a trembling world how and why the world went wrong. The spectacle is nearly always comic.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“For anyone addicted to reading commonplace books ... finding a good new one is much like enduring a familiar recurrence of malaria, with fever, fits of shaking, strange dreams. Unlike a truly paludismic ordeal, however, the symptoms felt while savoring a collection of one man’s pet quotations are voluptuously enjoyable ...”
—M.F.K. Fisher (1908–1992)