7 mental disorders of our time
From Dissociative Identity Disorder to Munchausen Syndrome
Mental disorders are one of the global medical problems of our time. Depression alone accounts for 4.3% of the total morbidity. More than 260 million people are living with anxiety disorders. The WHO estimates that the damage that mental disorders will cause to the global economy will amount to $ 16.3 trillion between 2011 and 2030. Let's talk about some of them.
Depression
This is a complex of mental disorders associated with the emotional sphere. This disorder is characterized by prolonged feelings of longing, guilt, anxiety, and avoidance of socializing and entertainment. A person may experience anhedonia, that is, a loss of the ability to experience pleasure, or apathy - emotional detachment, when positive and negative emotions are not felt. People with depression get tired quickly, find it difficult to complete everyday tasks, maintain concentration, and are haunted by gloomy thoughts about themselves and their environment. Physiological manifestations may also be present: sleep disturbances, improper bowel function, problems in the sexual sphere, unpleasant sensations in the body.
Schizophrenia
In schizophrenia, a person loses the unity of mental functions: thinking, emotions and motor skills. The manifestations of this disease are extremely diverse. There may be a decrease in mental activity and emotional impoverishment; hallucinations, neurotic disorders and delusional ideas (culturally inadequate, ridiculous, impossible or grandiose) also appear. People with schizophrenia can “hear” their thoughts and feel that others know their content; they also note the presence of "voices" that comment on their actions. The speech and behavior of a person with schizophrenia can be disorganized.
The reasons for the development of schizophrenia are varied: biological, social, psychological, and even environmental. It is believed that people with schizophrenia have a genetic predisposition to it, which is realized under the influence of external factors. However, it is impossible to predict from genes whether a person will have schizophrenia. The main method of treatment is psychopharmacology; psychotherapy or psychocorrection can also be used.
Panic disorder
This disorder is characterized by the regular occurrence of spontaneous panic attacks. These are very intense attacks of fear or panic, which are always accompanied by bodily reactions: pressure rises, heart pounds, chills, dizziness, various parts of the body go numb, and shortness of breath begins. All this time, a person can be haunted by secondary fears: that he will die or faint (which is impossible with a panic attack), that he will be considered crazy or sick, that he will lose control of himself.
If a person has experienced a panic attack once in his life, this does not mean that they will happen regularly: the disorder occurs when there are persistent secondary fears. A panic attack can occur under conditions of stress, physical or psychological exhaustion, as well as with alcohol and psychostimulant abuse. Due to the fears present during and after a panic attack, a person begins to avoid an active lifestyle: in part, he is held at home by the belief that he cannot be helped during an attack in a public place.
Dissociative identity disorder
This is a very rare disorder that is often confused with schizophrenia. A combination of mental disorders, such as blackouts, impaired consciousness and feelings of personal identity, leads to the feeling that several different personalities (ego states) exist in the body of one person. These individuals can be of different gender, age, social status, intelligence and character. Similar sensations can occur in a person with schizophrenia, but in this case the very core of the personality is destroyed. With dissociative disorder, the deep mechanisms of the psyche are turned on, but the person's personality is preserved.
This disorder is caused by severe emotional trauma in early childhood and repeated physical, sexual or emotional abuse. In a person, mechanisms of psychological defense are triggered, such as repression (elimination of a traumatic episode from consciousness) or dissociation - in this state, a person perceives what is happening to him as if it is happening to someone else. As a rule, people with dissociative personality disorder show no other impairment, with the exception of some episodes of amnesia that occur when one person replaces another (but amnesia does not always happen). Switching between personalities, as a rule, happens unexpectedly, without certain prerequisites and periodicity.
Eating disorders
These are psychogenically determined behavioral syndromes associated with eating disorders. The most famous of these are anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and psychogenic overeating. Anorexia nervosa is characterized by deliberate weight loss that is caused or maintained by the individual. At the same time, he has a distorted image of his own body, which often leads to an extreme degree of thinness and disturbances in the work of internal organs. With bulimia nervosa, a person who is overly concerned about his own body weight has frequent bouts of overeating, which lead him to take extreme measures - inducing vomiting or taking laxatives. With psychogenic overeating, a person tends to take food in a state of sadness, fatigue, strong emotional shock, without feeling hungry and without controlling the amount of food eaten.
Biological, psychological, cultural and social factors influence the development of eating disorders. Genetics are responsible for ERP, as well as abnormal levels of many hormones, especially serotonin. These disorders affect people with a certain personality type. In particular, anorexia often suffers from the obsessive type, which is characterized by a desire for perfectionism, low self-esteem and controlling behavior. In addition, RPP is common in industrialized cultures, where thinness is associated with beauty and is replicated in the media.
PTSD - Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
This condition occurs as a result of single or repetitive traumatic situations such as war, physical trauma, sexual abuse, or the threat of death. It develops only in some people. The criteria for the diagnosis is an extreme stressful event experienced in the past, associated with a threat to life and a violation of one's own physical integrity or that of other people, as well as the experience at this moment of strong emotions: fear, horror and helplessness. The experienced situation and related experiences are reproduced in nightmares, involuntary recurrent memories or flashbacks may occur. A person avoids thoughts and conversations, as well as actions, places and people, in one way or another associated with a traumatic experience: these situations can serve as triggers that trigger unpleasant experiences again. There is a point of view
Much of the research on PTSD has been conducted during major military conflicts. Thus, during the First World War, what was called trench shock, or traumatic neurosis, was discussed; After World War II, Grinker and Spiegel's classic pilot study emerged that could be considered a detailed description of PTSD. Many publications on PTSD were written during and after the Vietnam War. However, not only war veterans suffer from PTSD, but also people who have experienced another strong shock, and the cause of the injury may be not so much the objective danger of the event as its subjective meaning.
Simulated disorder, or Munchausen syndrome
This mental disorder belongs to the group of fake or simulated disorders. The person mimics, exaggerates, or artificially induces the symptoms of the disease in order to receive medical attention, for example, taking medications that cause side effects, or self-mutilation. This does not mean that a person is faking symptoms of illness in order to avoid unwanted events, such as military service or prosecution for an offense committed by him, or to obtain benefits from this, such as benefits or allowances. Among the diagnostic criteria for the syndrome, the absence of external motivations is indicated. The most common cause of Munchausen syndrome is an unconscious desire for attention and additional care. This can be due to psychological trauma, lack of love and care in childhood. People with the syndrome can look for or cause symptoms of the disease in themselves, or they can spread it to loved ones who, for some reason, are highly dependent on them, such as children or elderly relatives. Typically, the clinician recognizes the mimicked disorder by a set of symptoms described by the patient that does not occur in precisely this ratio. In addition, the presence of the syndrome can be indicated by the entries in the patient's card that he regularly admits with very diverse symptoms to the same clinic.
