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Originally Posted by Redway
That’s where other types of bipolar psychosis and the unsystematic schizophrenias (paraphrenias) come in. A true schizobiopolar mix almost doesn’t exist it’s that rare. 8 time’s out of ten schizoaffective psychosis is a misdiagnosis.
You’ll have to forget all about the DSM and the artificial division between affective and psychotic symptoms. It’s only recently in the DSM that psychosis has been limited to hallucinations and delusions but that’s not the original definition of psychosis or how it works in reality. Like I say a psychosis is just a mental illness in the truest sense of the word. Compared to the neuroses that don’t involve the mental plain directly (just nervous symptoms).
Schizophrenia’s a type of premature dementia. Hallucinations and delusions are just accessory symptoms of a defect syndrome that’s going on in the background and those accessory symptoms are just as common in schizophrenia as they are in other forms of dementia and other psychoses (including bipolar disorder). You’re already going wrong by hyping up the accessory symptoms assuming that hallucinations always point at schizophrenia and nothing else.
Like I say the DSM’s trash. Familiarise yourself with Kraepelin and Leonard.
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I envy your clarity of view and respect your reference to the old greats like Kraepelin and Leonard.
I'm not saying the connections between symptoms that constitute recognized syndromes are incorrect. But I can't help thinking we are still far from certain. It is as if we have a vast tapestry in front of us and are able to see only certain spots on it (syndromes), with some fragments of patterns weaved from different palettes of colours from the spectrums of mood, cognition and behaviour. And we keep on trying to divine the whole tapestry by connecting and reconnecting those spots in different ways. Something which used to be thought of as unipolar depression with brief hypomanic episodes could now be bipolar 2, some ADHD cases may also be reclassified as bipolar 2, schizophrenia could be bipolar 1 with psychotic features, BPD+dysthymia could be bipolar 2.
I know it's not practical or accepted, bofore or now, but I still prefer to separate the visible threads of the pattern if that makes sense.
edit: having said all that, I love when you mention schizophrenia as premature dementia.