NLE Review: Common Psychiatric Terms

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Affect
The outward manifestation of a persons feelings, tone or mood. Affect and emotions are
commonly used interchangeable.

Agitation
Excessive motor activity, usually purposeless and associated with internal tension. Examples:
inability to sit still, pacing, wringing of hands, or pulling of clothing.

Akathisia
Motor restlessness ranging from a feeling of inner disquiet, often localized in the muscles, to
inability to sit still or lie quietly, a side effect of some antipsychotic drugs.

Akinesia
A side effect of the antipsychotic drugs characterized by a general lack of motor movement in
the patient, as well as a slowing down of speech and responsiveness.

Ambivalence
The coexistence of contradictory emotions, attitudes, ideas, or desires with respect to a particular
person, object, or situation. Suggests psychopathology only when present in an extreme form.

Anhedonia
Loss of interest and/or pleasure in usual activities associated with depression.

Anxiety
Apprehension, tension or uneasiness that stems from the anticipation of a danger, whose source
is largely unknown. Primarily of intrapsychic origin. (top)

Catatonia
Immobility with muscular rigidity or inflexibility and at times excitability most often seen in
schizophrenia.

Circumstantiality
In conversation, the use of excessive and irrelevant detail in describing simple events, the
speaker eventually reaching his goal only after many digressions.

Clang Association
In thinking, the association of words by sound rather than meaning, after resulting in nonsensical
rhymes and puns.

Cognitive
Refers to the mental process of comprehension, judgement, memory, and reasoning, as
contrasted with emotional and volitional processes.

Compulsion
An insistent, repetitive, intrusive and unwanted urge to perform an act that is contrary to one's
ordinary wishes and standard.

Confabulation
Fabrication of facts or events in response to questions about events that are not recalled because
of memory impairment.

Conflict
A mental struggle that arises from the simultaneous operation of opposing impulses, drives
external or internal demands (intra psychic when the conflict is between internal forces - extra
psychic when the conflict is between self and the environment.

Confusion
Disturbed orientation in respect to time, place or person.

Countertransference
The therapist's partly unconscious or conscious emotional reactions to the patient. (top)

Defense Mechanisms
Patterns of feelings, thoughts, or behaviors that arc relatively involuntary and arise in response to
perceptions of psychic danger to alleviate the conflicts or stressors that give rise to anxiety. May
be either maladaptive or adaptive, depending on their severity, their inflexibility, arid the context
in which they occur. Some common defense mechanisms arc compensation, conversion, denial,
displacement, dissociation, intellectualization, repression, projection, somatization, suppression,
undoing, splitting, idealization, reaction formation.

Delirium
A clouding of consciousness, marked by reduced ability to focus on and sustain attention to
environmental stimuli. Usually of abrupt onset, the syndrome develops over a short period of
time with symptoms fluctuating in severity over the course of a day. Perceptual disturbance,
incoherent speech, sleep-wake disturbance, emotional liability, disorientation and memory
impairment may be present. Condition is reversible except when followed by dementia or death.

Delirium tremors
An acute and sometimes fatal brain disorder caused by total or partial withdrawal from excessive
alcohol intake. Usually develops in 24 to 96 hours after cessation of drinking.Symptoms include
fever, tremors, ataxia, and sometimes convulsions, frightening illusions, delusions, and
hallucinations.

Delusion
A firm, fixed idea not amenable to rational explanation and maintained despite objective
evidence to the contrary. Some types of common delusions are delusions of being controlled,
delusions of grandeur, delusions or persecution and somatic delusions.

Dementia
A deterioration of intellectual abilities of sufficient severity to interfere with social or
occupational functioning. Dementia may follow a progressive, static, or remitting course
depending on the underlying etiology. Memory disturbance is the most prominent symptom. In
addition there is impairment of abstract thinking, judgement, impulse control, and/or personality
change.

Depersonalization
An alteration in the perception or experience of the self so that the feelings of one's own reality is
temporarily lost; a sense of unreality.

Dystonia
Acute tonic muscular spasms, often of the tongue, jaw, eyes and neck but sometimes of the
whole body. Reactions may come on quickly and dramatically, A treatable side effect of
antipsychotic drugs.

Echolalia
Repetition (echoing) of words or phrases of others.

Echopraxia
The pathological repetition by imitation of the movements of another person.

Flight of Ideas
A nearly continuous flow or accelerated speech with abrupt changes from topic to topic, usually
based on understandable associations, distracting stimuli, or plays on words.

Grandiosity
An inflated appraisal of one's worth, power knowledge, importance, or identity.

Hallucinations
A sensory impression in the absence of any external stimuli; can arise in respect to any sensory
modality - visual, auditory, olfactory, tactile or gustatory.

Hypomania
Abnormality of mood but even normal euphoria and mania. Characterized by optimism, pressure
of speech and activity, and decreased need for sleep. Some people have increased creativity
while others demonstrate poor judgment and irritability.

Ideas of influence
The conviction that one's behavior, including one's thoughts is being influenced in some way by
an external agency, when in fact it is not.

Ideas of reference
The interpretation of external events, especially the actions and statements of other people, as
having reference to one's self when in fact they do not.

Loose Associations
Thinking that is overgeneralized, diffuse, and vague with only a tenuous connection between one
thought and the next.

Mania
A mood disorder characterized by excessive elation, hyperactivity, agitation,- and accelerated
thinking and speaking - sometimes manifested as flight of ideas. Mania is seen in major affective
disorders and in some organic mental disorders.

Mood
A pervasive and sustained emotion that in the extreme markedly colors one's perception of the
world. ' Examples of mood include depression, elation, and anger.

Obsession
A persistent, unwanted idea or impulse that can not be eliminated by logic or reasoning. (top)

Panic Attacks
: Sudden onset of intense apprehension, fearfulness, or terror - is accompanied by physiological
changes.

Paranoid Ideation
Suspiciousness or nondelusional belief that one is being harassed, persecuted, or unfairly treated.
Parkinson's Syndrome
A treatable syndrome of side effects from antipsychotic medication which appear after one or
two weeks and that is characterized by resting tremor, muscle rigidity, including a mask-like
face; slow motor movement, and a stooped, shuffling gait.

Preservation
The emission of the same verbal or motor response again and again to varied stimuli, despite the
parson's effort to move on.

Phobia
An obsessive, persistent, unrealistic intense fear of an object or situation.

Posturing
Maintaining an unusual or awkward posture for a considerable amount of time.

Poverty of Thought
Few verbal communications or ones that convey little information because of vagueness, empty
repetitions, or stereotyped or obscure phrases.

Pseudodementia
Clinical features resembling a dementia that are not due to organic brain dysfunction or disease.

Psychomotor Agitation
Excessive motor activity associated with a feeling of inner tension, the activity is usually non
productive and repetitious.

Psychomotor Retardation
Visible generalized slowing down of physical reactions, movements, and speech.

Psychosis
A major mental disorder of organic or emotional origin in which a person's ability to think,
respond emotionally, remember, communicate, interpret reality, and behave appropriately is
sufficiently impaired so as to interfere grossly with the capacity to meet the ordinary demands of
life. Often characterized by regressive behavior, inappropriate mood, diminished impulse
control, and such abnormal mental content as delusions and hallucinations.

Psychosomatic
The constant and inseparable interaction of the psyche (mind) and the soma (body). Commonly
used to refer to illnesses in which the manifestations are primarily physical with at least a partial
emotional etiology. (top)

Tangential
In conversation, digressions that divert the speaker from his goal, which he never reaches; to be
distinguished from circumstantial in which the goal is eventually reached.

Tardive Dyskinesia
Literally 'late appearing abnormal movements;' a variable complex of choreiform or athetoid
movements developing in patients exposed to antipsychotic drugs. Typical movements include
tongue-writhing or protrusion, chewing, lip-puckcring, choreiform finger movements, toe and
ankle movements, leg-jiggling, or movements of neck, trunk, and pelvis.

Thought Blocking
A sudden obstruction or interruption in the train of thought or speech, which the person is unable
to complete.

Thought Broadcasting
A symptom of psychosis in which the patient believes that thoughts are broadcast outside the
head so that other persons can actually hear them.

Thought insertion
The patient's belief that thoughts that are not the patient's own Can be inserted into his mind.

Thought Withdrawal
An interruption in the train of thought perceived by tile person as someone removing or taking
away his thoughts.

Transference
The unconscious assignment to others of feelings and attitudes that were originally associated
with important figures (parents, siblings, etc.) in one's early life. The transference may be
negative or positive.