Author: depressions-treatment

What are Mental and Behavioral Disorders due to the use of volatile solvents?

One out of ten students before grade 11 tried or systematically used volatile solvents.

Causes of Mental and Behavioral Disorders Due to the Use of Volatile Solvents

Volatile liquids and gases, the inhalation of which causes euphoria: glues, aerosols, solvents, gasoline, heated dry cleaners, gases for anesthesia (nitrous oxide), volatile nitrates. The effect depends on the active substance: aliphatic hydrocarbon, ether, ketone, mixed compound.

Symptoms of Mental and Behavioral Disorders Due to the Use of Volatile Solvents

Acute intoxication
Euphoria, disinhibition, disorientation, dizziness, fainting, headache, inappropriate behavior, convulsions.

Harmful use
Somatic changes in the form of arrhythmias, hypotension, bradycardia, lacrimation, dilation of the blood vessels of the sclera and conjunctiva, visual impairment and diplopia, burns, dehydration. Dementia with cognitive dysfunction, ataxia and dysarthria, paresthesia, encephalopathy with diffuse atrophy.

Addiction syndrome
The phenomena of mental and physical dependence.

Withdrawal syndrome
Irritability, conflict, drowsiness, or insomnia.

Psychotic disorder
Schizophrenic psychoses with auditory true and pseudo-hallucinations. Paranoid states with ideas of attitude, persecution.

Amnestic syndrome
Violation of concentration, fixative amnesia.

Residual state and psychotic disorder with delayed debut

Encephalopathy and delayed schizophrenia-like psychotic conditions.

Diagnosis of Mental and Behavioral Disorders Due to the Use of Volatile Solvents

Medical history, halitosis, runny nose, tinnitus, dermatitis, liver changes and toxic intoxication clinic.

Differential diagnosis

Differentiate with psychotic disorders in organic brain diseases, other mental and behavioral disorders as a result of the use of psychoactive substances.

Treatment for Mental and Behavioral Disorders Due to the Use of Volatile Solvents

Symptomatic therapy and detoxification. Psychotherapy and behavioral therapy.

Causes of Mental and Behavioral Disorders Due to Cocaine Use

Cocaine exists in the form of cocaine-HCl, a cocaine base. The first has a bitter taste and is soluble in water. Cheaper stimulants are added to the powder, as well as local anesthetics, the “freezing” effects of which are taken as the effect of cocaine. Cocaine alkaloid crystals are obtained by heating or smoking (crack) cocaine base powder when mixed with water and baking soda. The drug is administered iv, it is smoked, sniffed. It increases synaptic levels of dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin by inhibiting their reuptake in the synaptic cleft.

Symptoms of Mental and Behavioral Disorders Due to Cocaine Use

Acute intoxication
Euphoria, a surge of energy, an increase in the resolution of perception, an increase in mental activity, a decrease in appetite, anxiety, a decrease in the need for sleep, and increased self-confidence.

Harmful use
Pain behind the sternum, myocardial infarction, sudden death, pneumothorax, pulmonary edema, keratitis, ulcerative gingivitis, change in sense of smell. Depression and episodes of anxiety, a tendency to suicide and accidents, convulsions, hyperthermia.

Addiction syndrome
The rapid development of physical and mental dependence.

Withdrawal syndrome
After a withdrawal period of 1-5 days, withdrawal syndrome is noted. Depression, depression, irritability, insomnia, apathy, lethargy are typical.

Psychotic disorder
Cocaine delirium with tactile and olfactory hallucinations, incoherent thinking, disorientation. Cocaine delusional disorder with ideas of harassment, suspicion, bouts of aggression. Schizophrenia-like cocaine disorder with inadequate behavior, dysphoria, auditory, visual and tactile hallucinations (cocaine bugs swarming under the skin). Impact ideas.

Amnestic syndrome
Fixative amnesia, retro-, anterograde amnesia.

Residual state and psychotic disorder with delayed debut
In the residual period, tics, echolalia, ataxia, obsessive and compulsive disorders. Delayed psychoses with depression, delirium, schizophrenia-like conditions.

Diagnosing Mental and Behavioral Disorders Due to Cocaine Use

Symptoms of cocaine intoxication, in particular, perforation of the nasal septum, cocaine marks at the injection site (orange-pink bruising), crack keratitis, crack finger as a result of repeated contact of the finger with the lighter wheel, crack hand with hyperkeratosis and burn changes, tooth erosion.

Differential diagnosis
Mental and behavioral disorders due to the use of other psychoactive substances should be distinguished.

Treating Mental and Behavioral Disorders Due to Cocaine Use

Detoxification using bromocriptine and antidepressants. Benzodiazepines, cooling wraps, beta blockers and calcium channel blockers, activated carbon and laxatives. Psychotherapy against relapse, behavioral therapy.

What are Mental and Behavioral Disorders Due to the Use of Hallucinogens?

It develops thanks to the psychedelic movement in modern culture.

Causes of Mental and Behavioral Disorders Due to the Use of Hallucinogens

The group includes the use of psychotomimetics such as LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, as well as phencyclidine and Ecstasy (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine), which have both hallucinogenic and amphetamine effects. Used per os, as applications on the mucous membranes, in cigarettes.

Symptoms of Mental and Behavioral Disorders Due to the Use of Hallucinogens

Acute intoxication

Uncontrolled laughter, crying, mood changes, formal disturbances in thinking, euphoria, synesthesia, depersonalization and derealization. Phencyclidine intoxication resembles amphetamine.

Harmful use

Somatic symptoms include tachycardia, increased blood pressure, mydriasis, sweating, fever, nausea, dizziness, and psychopathological symptoms include mental dullness and depression.

Addiction syndrome

Mostly mental addiction.

Withdrawal syndrome

Mood change. There is no pronounced withdrawal syndrome.

Psychotic disorder

Schizophrenia-like disorder with symptoms of depersonalization and derealization, panic attacks, distorted perception of time, visual and auditory pseudo-and true hallucinations, stereotyped repetition of visual images, ideas of exposure. Delusions of attitude, meaning and harassment.

Amnestic syndrome

Not very pronounced.

Residual wealth and psychotic disorder with delayed debut

Mental dullness and the re-emergence of visual or depersonalization images.

Diagnosis of Mental and Behavioral Disorders Due to the Use of Hallucinogens

Based on the history and description of the clinic of intoxication.

Differential diagnosis

Differentiate with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder and alcohol delirium, organic narcolepsy based on follow-up observation, history data.

Treating Mental and Behavioral Disorders Due to the Use of Hallucinogens

Prescription of benzodiazepines and barbiturates, detoxification and increased excretion of psychoactive substances.

Causes of Premature Ejaculation

Psychogenic reasons. Possible occurrence with prolonged abstinence, anxiety, pain. It is included in the syndrome of the paracentral lobe, in which, in addition to premature ejaculation, enuresis in childhood and a decrease in Achilles reflexes are present.

Symptoms of Premature Ejaculation

With a good and satisfactory erection, ejaculation occurs in severe cases before the introduction of the penis into the vagina; in milder versions, the patient indicates a short period from the introduction of the penis to ejaculation, which does not allow the second partner to be satisfied.

Diagnosis of Premature Ejaculation

Inability to delay ejaculation for the period necessary to satisfy both partners of sexual intercourse.

Differential diagnosis

It should be differentiated from organic, including urological, causes of the disorder.

Treating Premature Ejaculation

Reflexology, psychotherapy, harmonization of a couple’s relationship.

What is Post Traumatic Disorder?

Post-traumatic disorders are disorders that occur during an extremely severe stressful life event or a significant change in life, leading to persisting unpleasant circumstances, resulting in an adaptation disorder. An important point is the relative nature of the trauma, that is, it is important to consider individual, often particular vulnerability

Causes of Post Traumatic Disorder

It develops in people who have experienced emotional or physical stress (military operations, disasters, bandit attacks, rape, house fire).

Symptoms of Post-Traumatic Disorder

The experience of injury again and again in a dream, thoughts and waking state, while in the imagination the picture of the injury can be objective and lively. Characterized by emotional deafness to all other experiences in life, including relationships with other people, concomitant symptoms in the form of vegetative lability, depression and cognitive impairment. Lack of pleasure from life and its manifestations (anhedonia).

Children and old people suffer harder stress. The duration of the disorder is more than 1 month.

Treatment for Post Traumatic Disorder

Antidepressants, sleeping pills, if necessary antipsychotics. Group and family psychotherapy.

Causes of Pathological Addiction to Gambling (Human Addiction)

Unknown. Increases during stress and is compulsive.

Symptoms of a Pathological Addiction to Gambling (Human Addiction)

Frequent repeated episodes of participation in gambling, leading to a decrease in professional, material and family values. Patients risk their work, make big debts, break the law in order to raise money or to avoid paying debts. Pathological addiction to computer games with a symbolic win. Lyudomania often, although not always, contributes to the formation of a dependent personality disorder, which is characterized by redirecting most of the problems to the object of the game or person, subordinating their needs to the game or dominant personality, and the formation of mental dependence. In loneliness or outside the game, addicted individuals have a feeling of helplessness and fear of an independent decision, as well as a fear of being abandoned, no free decisions can be made. With lyudomania, a pathological propensity for gambling, vivid violent ideas about the game are described, which take possession of the person especially at the time of stress. As a result of long-term (more than 7 hours a day) work at the computer, a special professional behavior modification and a peculiar coloration of neurosis and psychosis arise. Professional modification of behavior, in particular, is expressed in simplifying speech turns, looking over the interlocutor’s head, automatic gestures resembling typing on the dashboard before falling asleep and waking up, hypnagogic computer images when falling asleep, changing the structure of communication and dreams. In case of sudden problems (erasing information, computer failure), the so-called “absence” effects are revealed, which are expressed in psychogenic freezing in front of the screen, confusion and asthenia, and sometimes anxiety and restless fussiness.

Treatment of Pathological Addiction to Gambling (Human Addiction)

Neuro-linguistic programming, transactional analysis, computer psychotherapy.

Causes of Paranoid Personality Disorder

Features of education and early development, forming a basic distrust of others. Distrust develops in early childhood as a result of the child’s distance from the mother; as a result, he develops a diffuse fear, which later turns into a wary and distrustful attitude towards others. A pronounced protective mechanism of projection is characteristic.

Symptoms of Paranoid Personality Disorder

Starting from adolescence, there has been a persistent tendency to interpret the actions of other people as suspicious, degrading the patient’s dignity and causing his fear, distrust and the need to protect themselves from them in a strictly defined way. Patients believe that those around them exploit, wanting to take away their acquired benefits, social prestige or economic success, harm them, often behave in such a way as to discredit or humiliate the patient. Often they are pathologically jealous, demanding without reason evidence of loyalty to their spouse or sexual partner. At the same time, they consider observance of personal fidelity completely optional. Externalizing their own emotions, they use protection in the form of a projection, attributing to others their own unconscious traits, intentions, motives, motives. By virtue of affective flatness, they seem unemotional, devoid of heat, they are impressed only by the strength and power that they worship and obey. In social terms, paranoid personalities look businesslike and constructive, but their tendency to intrigue to identify fidelity or infidelity subordinates often cause fear and create conflict. They constantly protect the basic desire to experience their increased importance and usefulness, and each time they attribute everything that happens to their own account, they are overly sensitive to failures and failures. Patients with paranoid personality disorders are predisposed to chronic delusional disorders, induced delusional disorders and paranoid schizophrenia.

Diagnosis of Paranoid Personality Disorder

It should be distinguished from chronic delusional disorders in which the development of paranoid monoids is possible. However, with personality disorders, suspicion and a tendency to overvalued formations are noted already from childhood.

Treatment for Paranoid Personality Disorder

Individual psychotherapy, anxiolytics and small doses of antipsychotics.

Reasons for the Lack of Genital Reaction

Sexual disharmony or psychogeny. Equivalent to psychogenic impotence.

Symptoms of a Lack of Genital Reaction

If there are signs of sexual dysfunction in men, a full erection occurs in the early stages of sexual intercourse, but disappears during intercourse, so an erection is present, but not during intercourse. Partial erection is sometimes possible.

In the presence of signs of sexual dysfunction in women, stimulation of erogenous zones does not lead to the disappearance of vaginal dryness for psychogenic reasons (disharmony) or as a result of menopause, the addition of an infectious lesion of the bartholin glands.

Diagnosis of the Absence of a Genital Reaction

In men, erectile dysfunction is characterized in that the erection persists during sleep, masturbation, or with another partner. In women, vaginal dryness, psychogenic or pathological (infection, menopause).

Differential diagnosis

It should be differentiated with other disorders of the erection component, for example, with organic damage to the brain, vascular lesions of the cavernous bodies, cerebrospinal disorders.

Treatment of the Absence of a Genital Reaction

Psychotherapy, behavioral therapy, including sex therapy. Erectotherapy and treatment with local negative pressure.

Symptoms of Acute Polymorphic Psychotic Disorder with Symptoms of Schizophrenia

This diagnosis is considered not only as the first with a schizophrenic manifest, but also in cases of a favorable course of the disease, for example, with prolonged remissions and spontaneous exits from psychosis, it is advisable to attribute each subsequent psychosis to this group, and not to schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder. In the clinic of acute psychosis of this group, there are productive symptoms of the first rank characteristic of schizophrenia, but there are no negative emotional-volitional disorders. The affect of anxiety, expansion, confusion. Motor activity is increased up to excitement.

Diagnosis of Acute Polymorphic Psychotic Disorder with Symptoms of Schizophrenia

1. Rapid changes in the symptoms of delirium, including delirium exposure, delusional interpretation and delusional perception characteristic of schizophrenia.
2. Hallucinations, including auditory commentators, contradictory and mutually exclusive, imperative truths and pseudo-hallucinations, somatic hallucinations and a symptom of open thoughts, sounding of one’s own thoughts related to symptoms of the first rank in schizophrenia.
3. Symptoms of emotional disorders: fear, anxiety, irritability, confusion.
4. Motor excitement.
5. The above productive symptoms of schizophrenia are noted for no more than a month.

Differential diagnosis

It should be differentiated from schizoaffective disorder, psychotic schizophrenia-like disorders in dependence on psychoactive substances. This psychosis differs from the clinic of schizoaffective disorder in that the period of affective disorders is shorter than the productive one, and productive symptoms of the first rank characteristic of schizophrenia are noted. Schizophrenia-like psychoses in addiction diseases and organic schizophrenia-like psychoses can be delimited using additional research methods (laboratory, somatic, neurological, neurophysiological) and on the basis of anamnesis.

Treatment of Acute Polymorphic Psychotic Disorder with Symptoms of Schizophrenia

In the treatment it is necessary to use detoxification therapy, antipsychotics in medium and sometimes in maximum doses. You should always prescribe supportive treatment with prolongations or conduct episodic short-term courses of therapy due to the risk of developing schizophrenia, and also insist on outpatient monitoring of the patient for at least one year. Pay attention to periods of sleep disturbances, emotional disturbances (episodes of anxiety), suspiciousness. It is these symptoms that can precede exacerbations, and therefore they are a signal for preventive therapy.

What is Organic Emotionally Labile (Asthenic) Disorder?

Almost all severe somatic and infectious diseases result in convalescence with asthenia.

Causes of Organic Emotionally Labile (Asthenic) Disorder

More often occurs in connection with cerebrovascular diseases, the so-called discirculatory encephalopathy, as well as in the long term (after a year) of craniocerebral injuries. Asthenia is also noted in the follow-up of individuals who have committed suicide attempts, after prolonged anesthesia, encephalitis, and all prolonged and severe somatic and infectious diseases, with brain tumors.

Symptoms of Organic Emotionally Labile (Asthenic) Disorder

The basis of the clinic is asthenic syndrome, which is characterized by: weakness, hypersensitivity (hypealgesia, hyperesthesia, hyperacusis, often photophobia), dizziness, decreased motor activity, rapid fatigability, irritability, impaired concentration, and tearfulness.

Diagnosis of Organic Emotionally Labile (Asthenic) Disorder

Based on the identification of a history of probable causes of emotional lability.

Differential diagnosis

More often it should be differentiated from neurotic disorders (neurasthenia, other specific neurotic disorders), in which there is no characteristic history and which are associated with psychological causes and stress. Significant physical and intellectual stress can lead to a clinic of neurasthenia, which can be distinguished from organic asthenia only after identifying the causes of the disorder.

Treatment of Organic Emotionally Labile (Asthenic) Disorder

It consists in taking non-specific stimulants (aloe, ginseng, fibs, eleutherococcus), nootropics (nootropil, phenibut, glutamic acid, encephabol, aminalon) for several courses of vitamin therapy with large doses, physiotherapy.