eli5: Difference between schizophrenia and psychosis?
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schizophrenia is a diagnosis made out of both positive and negative symptoms. Positive symptoms add something to a person like hearing voices or seeing things or having delusions ect. The negative are stuff that take away from a person such as low mood, withdrawal. Of course they could be a whole host of positive and negative symptoms outside the ones i have listed. The diognois itself requires both the positive and negative symptoms for a length of time without a trigger such as drugs.
However psychosis is a bit different its more episodic like could be due to sleep deprivation, use of drugs and only includes the positive symptoms such as the hallucinations and delusions.
I kept it brief for the sake of this subreddit
back then psychosis used to be a term for every psychological illness.
today its a term used to define:
a) issues of the thought process
b) hallucinations
c) loss of reality
d) intense and out of poportion emotions like paranoia
Schizoprehnia is a term for a number of “symptoms” (psychosis) most often “hallucinations” (for example: i hear and see things) and problems with the thought process (for example: someone is inducing / controlling my thoughts, they steal my thoughts)
Mainly, psychosis is a symptom and schizophrenia is a diagnosis.
There are a variety of schizophrenic and schizoid diagnosis that present in various ways. Many schizophrenics experience psychosis as part of their overall symptom set, but not all. Additionally, many other diagnoses can include psychosis as a symptom, including bipolar disorder, autism spectrum disorder, etc. Psychosis can also be its own diagnosis in the form of an acute psychotic episode related to things like stress, sleep deprivation, certain medications or drugs, medical conditions, etc.
Psychosis is clinically considered a positive symptom, meaning that it adds a specific experience to the person’s life (as opposed to negative symptoms which REMOVE a specific experience from their life). It includes hallucinations, delusions, disorganized/disordered thinking processes, etc. Each of these aspects can have a variety of presentations that are unique to the individual but are often classified under headings like auditory or visual hallucinations, paranoid or religious delusions, etc.
Symptoms may come and go throughout a person’s life and are often transient or pattern based, whereas diagnoses are typically only considered either “active”, “managed”, or “in remission”. An active diagnosis is any that is currently causing symptoms or would cause symptoms if left untreated. Managed means that the symptoms are controlled or non-existent due to treatment protocols and accomodation. In remission means that even without ongoing treatment protocols, symptoms are no longer occurring.
In my psych class we were told that schizophrenia was a diagnosis to describe a number of symptoms – whereas psychosis was a term that describes how the patient experiences those symptoms.
Essentially you can have neurosis (where the patient is aware of how the symptoms are affecting them) and psychosis (where the symptoms are so all encompassing, that the sufferer does is not able to identify them as symptoms of an illness)
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