Symptoms

The symptoms and severity of mental disorders are manifold, they can express themselves very subtly and remain largely hidden from the observer, or they can occur on a massive scale and represent a heavy burden for those affected and their environment. To illustrate the wide range of psychiatric symptoms, an exemplary collection of symptoms is presented here: Night-time panic attacks can be very stressful for the person affected. You can find all the important information on this subject at Nocturnal panic attacks – what is behind them?

Awareness, orientation and attention disorders: Twilight states, drowsiness, sleepwalking, disorientation in relation to oneself, the local environment, the current situation and temporal contexts, limited comprehension, distraction.
Memory disorders: Impairment of short and/or long-term memory, amnesia, false memories such as déjà vu experiences.
Intelligence disorders: Reduced intellectual capacity, either from birth or as part of the processes of old age or illness (dementia).
Thinking disorders: Disturbances of the thought process such as slowing down, brooding, inhibition of thinking, excesses of thoughts, thought jumps up to incoherence.
Delusion: Misjudgment of reality, which the affected persons hold on to stubbornly and with conviction and cannot be corrected from the outside. This includes persecution mania, jealousy mania, guilt mania or megalomania. Patients with delusional disorders reinterpret perceptions or experiences (delusional perception) and occasionally construct complex “delusional systems” that are confusing to outsiders but conclusive to those affected, in which they live as if in a second, subjective reality.
Perceptual disorders: False perceptions (hallucinations) in the area of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting and feeling.
Change in the intensity of perception (everything appears paler or more colorful, more distinct or blurred to the patients).
Ego disturbances: Ego-Disturbances express themselves in difficulties to separate the own person from the environment. Patients have the feeling that their thoughts are input, withdrawn or read from outside, they feel controlled or experience themselves, parts of themselves or the environment as changed, “strange” and alien.
Mood and drive disorders: Mood disorders can manifest themselves through increased or decreased expressions of sensations such as joy or sadness, or through their complete absence (numbness). An increased or decreased “deflection” (change of mood, influence) of the mood from outside can also be typical for certain psychological disorders.
Anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders: These include increased, sometimes seemingly nonsensical fears of certain or undefined situations, for example fear of spiders (arachnophobia), claustrophobia and claustrophobia, fear of illness (hypochondria). Compulsions often result from partly unconscious fears and express themselves in the patient’s own perception of the nonsensical use of gestures, rituals and actions (compulsive acts) or thoughts (compulsive thoughts). These include compulsion to clean, compulsion to count or compulsion to control.