Detailed information about psychotic episodes, hallucinations, delusions, and early intervention.
Postpartum psychosis is rare but severe — and unlike postpartum depression, it usually requires immediate hospitalisation. Early recognition saves lives.
Negative symptomsWorking memory — the ability to hold and manipulate information for a few seconds — is one of the most consistently affected cognitive functions in schizophrenia.
DelusionsThought withdrawal is one of the more disorienting experiences of psychosis — the felt sense that a thought is being pulled out of one's head, sometimes mid-sentence. It is a classic first-rank symptom.
HallucinationsHallucinations at the edge of sleep are common in healthy people and usually mean nothing. Knowing how they differ from the hallucinations of psychosis prevents a lot of unnecessary alarm.
Rare presentationsDissociation and psychosis can look like each other — voices, perceptual shifts, lost time. They are distinct conditions, but they overlap more often than older textbooks suggested.
SymptomsResidual schizophrenia is the phase between acute episodes when the loud symptoms have quieted but the quieter ones remain. It's where most of life with the illness happens.
HallucinationsBrief hallucinations at the edge of sleep are common in the general population. Knowing what they are — and aren't — can save a lot of unnecessary worry.
DelusionsCapgras delusion is the haunting conviction that a familiar person — often a spouse or parent — has been replaced by an identical impostor. Here's what we know.
PsychosisRecovery after a first episode of psychosis is more than the absence of symptoms. It is clinical, functional, and personal — and it unfolds over months and years.
DelusionsThought insertion is one of the strangest experiences in psychiatry — a thought arrives in the mind and is recognised as a thought, but is felt to belong to someone else. It is a hallmark first-rank symptom.
DifferentialDelirium is a medical emergency that can look like psychosis. Telling it apart from schizophrenia is one of the most consequential differential diagnoses in medicine.
HallucinationsSomatic hallucinations are perceived sensations from inside the body — organs moving, blood flowing in unusual ways, foreign objects within. They overlap with but differ from somatic delusions.
Negative symptomsExecutive function is the family of high-level cognitive processes that organise behaviour toward goals — planning, problem-solving, flexibility, inhibition. In schizophrenia, these are often substantially reduced.
DelusionsThought broadcasting is a particular kind of delusion in which thoughts feel as if they are leaving one's head and being heard by everyone in earshot. It is unusual, distressing, and treatable.
DifferentialPsychosis can occur as part of severe depression as well as in schizophrenia. The differences in mood, content, course, and treatment matter for getting better.
HallucinationsExtracampine hallucinations occur outside the normal sensory field — the sense that someone is behind you when you cannot see them. They are reported in psychosis and in several neurological conditions.
DelusionsWhen a person becomes convinced that the people around them can read their thoughts, every conversation becomes a kind of nakedness. Mind-reading delusions are a closely related cousin to thought broadcasting.
DifferentialParanoid personality disorder and paranoid schizophrenia share a word but not much else. One is a personality pattern; the other is a psychotic illness.
DelusionsWhen a person feels that their own arm is being moved by another agent, or that an emotion has been placed in them by an outside force, clinicians call it a delusion of control. It is one of the most distinctive experiences of psychosis.
HallucinationsPerceptual distortions alter how real things look, sound, or feel. They are not hallucinations, and the difference matters for diagnosis and treatment.
DelusionsReligious delusions occupy a difficult space — they often look like fervent faith from the outside and feel like revelation from the inside. The clinical task is to distinguish them from healthy spiritual life and treat them with care.