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Course: Health and medicine > Unit 9
Lesson 9: Psychotic disordersSchizoaffective disorder
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- What's the difference between psychotic depression and Schizophrenia with depressive symptoms?(8 votes)
- Psychotic depression, also known as depressive psychosis, is a major depressive episode that is accompanied by psychotic symptoms.
Symptoms include:
Individuals with psychotic depression experience the symptoms of a major depressive episode, along with one or more psychotic symptoms, including delusions and/or hallucinations.
Delusions can be classified as mood congruent or incongruent, depending on whether or not the nature of the delusions is in keeping with the individual's mood state.
Common themes of mood congruent delusions include guilt, punishment, personal inadequacy, or disease.
Half of patients experience more than one kind of delusion.
Delusions occur without hallucinations in about one-half to two-thirds of patients with psychotic depression.
Hallucinations can be auditory, visual, olfactory (smell), or haptic (touch). Severe anhedonia, loss of interest, and psychomotor retardation are typically present.
Schizophrenia patients that have depression systems as well will likely experience all of the above and depression symptoms which include:
-hopelessness
-extreme sadness
-suicidal thoughts
-moodiness
-Obsessive thoughts(4 votes)
- If Schizoaffective Disorder involves symptoms from both Schizophrenia AND a mood disorder, why is the prognosis better than someone with Schizophrenia alone? Do their schizophrenic symptoms tend to be milder?(6 votes)
- There is no "this prognosis is better than this prognosis" Both symptoms tend to vary in each patient.(2 votes)
- Okay call me crazy but, doesn't it seem a little strange that there's so little criterea for diagnosing Schizoaffective Disorder? I mean there has to be more differences between SD and plain Schizophrenia. However, (to answer my own question i guess) we don't really know a whole lot about either disorder so I assume there will be further explination and clear differenced defined in the next DSM.(3 votes)
- ok, so can you have some to most symptoms of schizoaffective disorder/schizophrenia without having the disorder?(2 votes)
- Okay, so I know of the difference mentioned below by Ohio S., but what's the main difference that helps diagnose psychotic depression over normal major/minor depression?(2 votes)
Video transcript
- [Voiceover] So schizoaffective
disorders are those where someone meets the
criteria for both schizophrenia and a major mood disorder,
and both sets of symptoms are enough so that they
cause some kind of distress or are interfering with normal daily life. So what exactly is a major
mood disorder though? Well, it's a bit of a broad
umbrella, or category, for illnesses that involve
a serious change in mood. And I don't just mean like feeling sad or irritable from time to time, not just like having a
bad day or something. Mood disorders affect your
everyday emotional state, and they're more intense,
and more difficult to manage compared to just a bad mood,
or just feelings of sadness. This might be persistent
sadness that doesn't go away. And so there's sort of a
spectrum of mood disorders, where we put a normal
mood right in the middle. And then all the way over on this side there's this severe depression, which seriously interferes with
your ability to enjoy life, and then there's varying degrees
of depression in between. And then all the way on the
other side there's mania, which is like this
abnormally elevated mood. So maybe things like
feeling very irritable, or having insomnia, and having very fast and energetic speech, or racing thoughts. And just like major depression,
this would be enough such that it interferes
with your daily life. And then you've also got
these varying degrees in between normal and mania. So a major mood disorder might be out here at severe depression, or
out here at severe mania, or you might have these,
like, huge swings in mood between depression and mania, which is sometimes
called bi-polar disorder. Okay, so let's say you've got this circle for major mood disorders like depression, mania, or bi-polar disorder, and then this circle
represents schizophrenia, and symptoms of psychosis like
hallucinations and delusions. If we combine these two
sets, this middle chunk is what we call schizoaffective disorder, which as we can see, has
both a major mood disorder and also symptoms of schizophrenia. Now just like schizophrenia
and mood disorders though, there have yet to be
any imaging or lab tests that we've developed to
definitely tell us that, hey, this person has schizophrenia, or hey, this person has severe depression, or this person has both,
meaning that they would have schizoaffective disorder. That being the case, we
have to look for symptoms of both schizophrenia and a mood disorder to come up with a diagnosis
of schizoaffective disorder. So what's pretty much
used to help psychiatrists diagnose mental disorders
is a book called the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of Mental Disorders, the 5th Edition, which is also frequently just called the DSM 5. Now this guide helps
psychiatrists look for certain specific criteria
for patients to meet to be diagnosed with
a particular disorder. So if we page to the section
on schizoaffective disorder we'll find several pieces
of criteria to meet in order to be diagnosed. First, the patient has to
have symptoms of psychosis, so things like delusions
and hallucinations, without a major mood disorder
for a period of two weeks in order to meet he criteria
for the schizophrenic portion. If this doesn't ever happen,
if we don't meet this criteria, then the symptoms are probably more likely to be in line with psychotic depression, as opposed to schizoaffective disorder. And secondly, a major mood episode, which is a mood disorder like depression, mania, or both, that lasts
greater than two weeks has to be present along side schizophrenia for an uninterrupted period of time to be classified as
schizoaffective disorder. But doesn't schizophrenia sometimes include depressive symptoms? Whats the difference between schizophrenia and depressive symptoms and
schizoaffective disorder? Well, in order to be diagnosed
with schizoaffective disorder you have to meet the criteria for major mood disorders as well, so if they were diagnosed
with schizophrenia with depressive symptoms,
the depressive symptoms must not be meeting the criteria to constitute a major mood disorder. Additionally, the patient has to be experiencing impairments in functioning due to both the schizophrenia and the major mood disorder. Alright, so let's pose the
million dollar question, what causes schizoaffective disorder? Well, by now you might be able to guess that we don't exactly know,
but it's thought to involve an imbalance in several
neurotransmitters in your brain, like dopamine, or norepinephrine. Although genetics likely plays a role, there have yet to be any genes identified. But with that said, we know that having family members with schizophrenia, bi-polar disorder, or
schizoaffective disorder itself, all increases your risk of developing schizoaffective disorder. And when we're treating
schizoaffective disorder, we're usually gonna use medications, but we need to be careful because now there's both symptoms of
schizophrenia and mood disorders. Currently there's only
one antipsychotic drug that's been approved by the FDA for treatment of schizoaffective
disorder, specifically, and it's called paliperidone, or invega. But there are other antipsychotics
that may be used as well to target symptoms of schizophrenia and help manage psychotic symptoms. For the mood disorder symptoms, it depends on the mood disorder present. If they have depression,
then antidepressants will probably be prescribed. If they have mania, then
it's likely they'll receive antipsychotics and mood
stabilizers, like lithium. Apart from drugs and medications though, the patient may undergo
some sort of psychotherapy. And the outlook, or prognosis, of someone diagnosed with
schizoaffective disorder varies, and it's thought to be somewhere between that of mood disorders and schizophrenia. With that said, there tends
to be a better outlook than for those with schizophrenia alone, and a worse outlook for those
with mood disorders alone. So the best prognosis would be over here with mood disorders and then the worst prognosis is over here with just schizophrenia. And schizoaffective disorder
is somewhere in between. So things are risk factors that have been shown to be associated
with a worse prognosis are things that relate to
the psychosis side of it, so being closer to schizophrenia. Other things are things
like earlier onset, and when there's no periods of remission, or temporary recovery, and finally, like we mentioned before, having a family member with schizophrenia.