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Thought disorders - causes, therapy and symptoms
contents
- psychopathology
- The research on thought processes
- Types of thought disorders
- Symptoms of thought disorder
- Schizophrenia and thought disorders
- Thinking Disorders of the Narcissistic Personality
- Cognitive restructuring
- Widespread thought disorder
- All or nothing think
- Jumping in conclusions
- Übergeneralisieren
- negative filter
- pass sentence
- Dramatize
- Confuse emotions with causes
- The "you should" think
- personalization
- delusions
Thinking disorders have two essential components. They include individuals whose thinking is disorganized and people who develop confused thoughts. A common distinction between these two disorders is that the first names the form, and the second the substance of thought.
The right thought does not want to succeed. When thought disorders have pathological value. Image: Syda Productions - fotolia Thinking disorders usually dentate doctors when a person's behavior or language contains problematic or illogical patterns or does not correlate. Thinking usually means three things: to think about something, to bring together the strands of what someone is thinking about, and, ultimately, the liberation or flow of a thought that yields a result. A thought disorder interrupts one or more aspects of this process.
psychopathology
Psychopathology recognizes thought disorders as symptoms of various neuropsychiatric disorders. To diagnose them, cognitive performance and memory are essential categories.
Formal and content-related thinking disorders differ, but also merge into each other. Formal thinking disturbs the thought process but not its speed; contentwise disturbances of thought concern the themes of thinking. Those affected take content distorted or wrong, or perceive it without cause as a threat (paranoid schizophrenia).
But beware: All people think illogically; all people sometimes feel confused; all people have problems articulating themselves in certain situations; all people sometimes take content incorrectly. A disturbance of thought occurs only when these perceptions burden the lives of the patients to a high degree and a normal everyday life is hardly possible.
The research on thought processes
Early in the history of psychiatry, the discussion of professionals raged about whether thought disorder is a functional or organic disease. Many experts distinguished the symptoms in primary and secondary.
Secondary abnormalities were often diagnosed in the normal hospital, and doctors linked them to delirium, dementia, and drug-induced problems. Traumatic brain injury also falls into the category of acquired disorder. On the other hand, confused and broken thoughts were considered to be the primary psychiatric illnesses of schizophrenia, mania or depression with psychosis.
Schizophrenia can lead to thought disorders. Image: eyeQ - fotolia It was clear, however, that thought disorders are a symptom of underlying diseases that underlie them. Patients with a primary disorder are usually younger and have no medically diganostic disease, no nebulized consciousness, and they are not disoriented.
Patients with brain injuries generally have no history of psychiatry, and if so, they are most rarely associated with their problem because their discomfort is a direct result of the brain's impaired brain function.
To capture thought processes, it is important to look at other components that are related to thought disorder. This includes disorders of perception such as illusions and hallucinations. However, asking a person about what he thinks is a difficult task.
It can be particularly difficult if the affected person suffers from a post-traumatic brain disorder, which is accompanied by disturbances of self-perception. This person is often unable to make changes in his thinking or changes in his self-perception, especially when he tends to neglect himself.
To understand thinking about a traumatic brain disorder, it may be useful to ask patients if it was difficult for them to think.
Types of thought disorders
A lack of logical connections of ideas, a digression from the original theme because of the weak relationship of ideas, loss of subject, the use of words and phrases without connection to rules of grammar (word salad), repetition of words, others say, the use of sounds Sound associations, self-designed words (neologisms) and the repetition of a particular word or phrase are typical of thought disorders.
Symptoms of thought disorder
People suffering from thought disorders usually have problems distinguishing the real from the non-real. Symptoms of thought disorder include hallucinations, conceits, and disorganized thinking. Almost all psychiatric patients have one or more of these symptoms. A hallucination is a sensory perception that affects the person in the full sense as real, but that takes place without external stimulation. Imagination is a firm, false belief stemming from a false conclusion about external reality. Disorganized thoughts expire when a person is unable to fill his thought process with convincing meaning.
Schizophrenia and thought disorders
Thinking disorders are traditionally associated with schizophrenia. The thinking and speaking of schizophrenic patients seems confused and disorganized and contains peculiar phrases.
Schizophrenia, a form of thought disorder, is a chronic brain disorder caused by changes in the brain functions that develop the nerves. The effects affect many aspects of life.
Many people with schizophrenia and thought disorders also struggle with mood and anxiety disorders, including depression and anxiety.
The thinking of schizophrenic children is also more impaired than that of normal children. Especially illogical thinking and loose associations are typical of young schizophrenics.
Schizophrenia is a psychiatric illness in which thought disorders are essential. The "formal disorder" interferes with the patient's language, and schizophrenia language variations are considered as a side effect of the collapse of the psychic structures and associative processes associated with psychosis. Today, we assume that the language of schizophrenia per se is affected, especially in its semantic, discursive and pragmatic aspects.
Some authors today see schizophrenia primarily as a disease that specifically affects speech, and the neuroanatomical and genetic correlations of this speech impairment are being studied today. Such efforts may lead to a better understanding of the pathophysiology of this devastating mental illness.
Thinking Disorders of the Narcissistic Personality
People with narcissistic personality disorders show disturbed thinking when they waver in between over-idealizing and invalidating themselves. For this they tend to overestimate their abilities as well as their own meaning.
Such people have fantasies about gaining unlimited power, as well as success or special gifts. This over-realization of one's own personality can lead to them being arrogant, reckless and over-demanding. As a result, they repeatedly come into conflict with others.
For example, a person with this psychic structure ignores the social rule of waiting in line to get a ticket, instead pushing himself to the top because he thinks his needs are more important than those of other people, and he is therefore entitled to special treatment.
Of course, the people who are politely standing in line do not tolerate this behavior, and the conflict breaks out. Problems also arise when the person with the narcissistic personality disorder comes into a situation in which he realizes his human limitations. When this happens, those affected will find it very difficult to handle such a situation.
Any admission to failure is difficult. Suddenly recognizing their normal human limitations typically causes them to question themselves completely - from an overly-idealized fantasy of boundless success and special abilities, they fall into complete shame and depression in a crippling sense.
Cognitive restructuring
Cognitive restructuring means becoming aware of someone's thought patterns, evaluating them and, if necessary, changing them. We experience stress when we perceive something as stressful. For example, a bad hairstyle day can put a teenager under great stress while not disturbing another.
Most people have disturbed thinking patterns that correspond to the level of stress they feel. Teenagers are particularly susceptible to such disorders. Recognizing our cognitive errors helps to actively change them, as well as our moods and behavior.
Widespread thought disorder
A mental disorder in the clinical sense refers to irritations to which all people tend more or less. Here are some typical patterns:
All or nothing think
The thoughts polarize into either or, all or nothing. Anything that does not seem perfect is considered a failure. Some examples of this type are: "I never do anything right," or "if I'm not brilliant, I have to be stupid," or "a woman can not make a career and run a household," or "if he does not love me, he hates me. "
Such patterns of thinking leave no room for the shades of gray that make up layers of reality and do not allow for compromise, or thinking through different alternatives. For example, the conclusion that "if I'm right you have to be wrong" does not include the possibility that both may be wrong or both may be correct or, as is usually the case with complex problems, different positions contain a true core.
This way of thinking is especially characteristic of the Borderline Syndrome mental disorder, as those concerned fail to integrate contradictory experiences of everyday life into their contradictions and compulsively try to divide them into "black and white" patterns.
An all-or-nothing thinking in relationships leads to alternately idealizing or vilifying either yourself or your partner.
If I do not look like Adonis I'm a fat sack, if I make second place I've lost, if water is not hot, it's cold.
Anyone who thinks this way is forced out of the constraint that only one way can be right and thus fails necessarily. The consequence: the afflicted oneself in addition, for "everything wrong" without having to think over the whole situation.
They are constantly under pressure: "If I fail this test, my life is worth nothing," "This is my last chance," "If I do not get this job, I'll never get one," or "It's about Life and death "- especially in situations where this is exactly what is not.
Examination stress can create thought blocks. Image: Patrick Daxenbichler - fotolia The intricate part of this thinking is that the "prophecies" are self-fulfilling. The prisoners involved in their All-or-nothing thinking are driven by great anxiety, and this fear drives them to cause extreme situations without realizing that they are heading for those situations.
The more scared I am of losing, the safer I can be to make that happen. The black-and-white thinkers then used this as a confirmation that they had "right", even though this "losing" is a consequence of fear: when fear paralyzes me, drives me to flee or in turn drives me into aggression, I do so Relationships broken, almost certainly screwing up exams, say, I'm not capable of a differentiated behavior that would be appropriate to the situation.
Developmental psychology, such people remain the thinking of infants who need this polarity to orient themselves in the still limited environment and to distinguish directly between good (mother, father) and evil (stranger, monster in the closet).
Since reality never offers anything or anything, but requires a tough process of learning and adjustment, in which successes are gradual, and who wants everything on the hard ground of reality, this thought disorder is likely to lead to catastrophe - in relationships as well as at work.
This thinking becomes pathological when those affected are no longer able to control it. For those who only have a certain inclination to these black and white designs, there are tricks to get this behavior under control.
1.) Ask yourself, even if it is hard at first: Is that true at all, what I think.
2.) Ask others and jump over their shadows by talking openly about their perception. Do you have people you trust? Then tell them, "I feel so small, and I think nobody likes me. Tell me, is that right? "
3.) Talk to yourself in the first person. Not, "I'm doomed," but "I think I'm doomed to fail.".
4.) Come out of her shell. Strange as it may sound for a polarized mindset that frightens those concerned, black-and-white thinking is much more convenient than compromise, finding solutions that are only up to 70% of your own, or tough after a failed trial To choose way of dry learning.
5.) Say goodbye to the delusion of being able to predict developments. Much in life happens by chance, whether something develops positive or negative for us, we usually do not know.
6.) Tell yourself again and again: They are not their behavior. Being an idiot is a self-imposed stigma of behaving idiotic, but it can be changed.
Jumping in conclusions
Those affected do not check conclusions, but "rely" on experience, intuition, and unconscious patterns. For example, they spin off a supposed mind reading based on the motto "She does it on purpose" or equate her own fears, conjectures and moods with the perspective of others: "My teachers do not like me."
This goes so far in the case of pathological distortions that even objects are provided with properties to which those concerned direct their own fears: "The city is against me."
If this thinking goes hand-in-hand with basic illnesses, such as anxiety disorders, without the filter of reflection, then those affected eventually settle in a delusional world, and the inability to test their own perceptions crosses the border into open psychosis.
Fear paralyzes thinking. Picture: alphaspirit - fotolia This may be a woman who is terrified of rape and is firmly convinced that two figures she sees in the morning while jogging in the park want to rape her. But this can also mean relocating one's longing for relationships that are not alienated, to constantly discover alleged similarities with other people, and then to be deeply disappointed each time they behave quite differently, because in reality these similarities never existed.
Such a lack of critical examination of one's own perceptions is also seamlessly transposed into conspiratorial fantasies that those concerned do not recognize as fantasies.
Übergeneralisieren
This thought disorder appears in harmless form as a trap of quick thinking in the patterns of intuition. Thinking intuitively is not only unavoidable, but also highly sensible in many everyday situations: We perceive a halfway familiar infrastructure of supermarkets, kiosks, residential areas etc. with our stored patterns, without analytically checking whether we are right.
For example, our intuition acquired through experience immediately tells us whether we are dealing with a group of celebrating students or a violent mob of neo-Nazis; our intuition tells us whether or not a snack can be open at night in a neighborhood.
For the most part, many people are moving in these intuitive patterns and generalizing about them: because they have had bad experiences with a citizen with a Turkish background, they are transferring them to all those who consider them Turks.
But such "experiences" are highly doubtful: A nice conversation with a blonde woman, who is called Diana, does not mean, in real terms, that blonde women named Diana are friendly to us.
Anyone who over-generalizes, for example, thinks that something always happens because it happened once. This can lead to nasty surprises when, for example, a student changes schools and writes a one in the first math job and thinks that would always be the case. Or vice versa: If I screw up a test and now assume that would be my fate for all time and so fail to remix the cards of my life.
Key words are "always, all, and never." "I'll never be happy," "nobody likes me," "everybody puts blame on me".
Those who tend to such generalizations may change their own behavior through critical examination. In between, keep asking yourself: is that correct?
negative filter
Those who constantly perceive the world through the filter of their negative view hide all the positive aspects that challenge their view - and vice versa.
When ten people smile at a party, he'll focus on the one who ignores him.
If the affected person receives compliments for their new hairstyle, she believes: "You only tell that so as not to unsettle me."
If such people have a positive experience they "feel" that the storm is coming.
If the sufferers succeed, then the negative filter immediately plays him down: "You were lucky", "just do not think you're special", "there are a thousand others who are more successful ..."
Especially in intellectual circles, sufferers often confuse these negative filters with critical thinking. The difference is that critical thinking means testing realities.
Although this can not always be applied to everyday situations in which our per se perception is subjective, we can certainly review our basic assumptions.
pass sentence
This variant of the all-or-nothing concerns either one's own person or other people. Instead of criticizing a behavior, the whole person is questioned: "He is a bad person" instead of "He just lied to me, and I can not accept this behavior" or "I'm stupid" instead of "I do not have for the I learned the exam and now I failed. ".
Dramatize
To exaggerate gives the gray everyday life splashes of color, but to summon up the catastrophe, makes a fulfilled everyday life difficult. If someone does something good, it is not worth mentioning, if someone behaves badly, that is a sign of a general disaster.
Affected individuals give individual statements, situations and forms of behavior a status that they neither have nor can not have.
Confuse emotions with causes
Sufferers believe something is true because it feels true to them. Our intutitive thinking tricked us here unintentionally. For example, someone feels that his dump, which is higher than the rent, is very cheap because he spares the effort to move.
The "you should" think
Therapists report that patients who report their problems are largely preoccupied with not doing things that they should "do," or even more impersonally, with "one has to do"..
With a smile, these obsessions can be called "Mussturbation". So those affected do not talk first about their (!) Real problems, but about abstract norms that they supposedly do not fulfill.
But those who are in it get carried to want to fulfill things because "you this so makes" or "because one does that," the alienated, first by his real needs and runs second, a standard corset afterwards in which he firstly does not fit in and , here's the word, also does not have to fit into it.
People who suffer from "mussturbation" often move in the same range of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
personalization
Personalization is a primitive human trait: our ancestors thought of thunder as a powerful man hurling a hammer, and children humanizing trees, animals, or stones.
All humans can best imagine the abstract when they give a faceless face.
People suffering from guilt complexes are tormented by incidents that they can not afford: "If I had told her to stop smoking, she would not have had lung cancer," "if I had taken a different path, we would not be fall in the hail and my daughter would have come to work on time ... "
delusions
Delusions are typical of psychosis; among the well-defined disorders they belong to schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, mania, and borderline syndrome.
Who suffers from delusions, is absolutely convinced of things that can not be true. He has the notion that other people conspire against him (conspiracy delusion) to be a famous personality; he recognizes "secret messages" on the Internet, television or radio; he develops quaint religious views. (Somayeh Ranjbar)
Specialist supervision: Barbara Schindewolf-Lensch (doctor)