GLOSSARY OF TERMS USED IN THIS SITE

ADJUSTMENT DISORDERS
Adjustment disorders are behavioral or emotional problems that start within 3 months after the onset of a stressor and end within 6 months after the stressor is removed. If the stressor continues, the problems may also continue and still be classified as an adjustment disorder. 

AFFECT 
Affect is displayed emotion. A person with flat affect does not display emotion; depressed people display sad, unhappy, affect. Psychosis is sometimes accompanied by inappropriate affect, for example by laughing when most people in the situation would be crying. Patients in the manic phase of bipolar disorder display overexcited, overoptimistic, exaggerated, affect. 

AGORAPHOBIA
Agoraphobia was named after phobia (fear) of the agora (marketplace), but its modern meaning is fear of any open places. 

AMNESIA
Amnesia is loss of memory; it is retrograde if memories before a fixed event are lost, and anterograde if memories after a fixed event are lost. An individual may have both kinds of amnesia.

ANTIANXIETY DRUGS (ALSO CALLED HYPNOANXIOLYTICS)
Drugs that have sedative effects (hence, "hypno") and reduce anxiety (hence, "anxiolytic"). All or nearly all of them are benzodiazepines or barbiturates. 

ANXIETY
Anxiety is fear brought about by anticipation of a negative event; normal anxiety may be adaptive because it heightens alertness and prepares an individual for action. Abnormal, unrealistic anxiety is a miserable condition that paralyzes the victim and prevents normal behavior. Anxiety involves bodily changes as well as subjective experience. 

COGNITIVE DISORDERS
Cognitive disorders are any disorders whose primary symptom is disordered thinking, as in dementia, delirium, or amnesia. 

COMPULSIONS
Behaviors individuals engage in to control or reduce their obsessive thoughts/worries (see below).  Typical compulsions involve hand washing to reduce the worry about germs, or mirror checking to reduce the worry that some physical characteristic is too noticeable.  For the behavior to be considered a compulsion, however, it must interfere with normal functioning.  For example, the person is late to work because each time he/she is about to leave the house he/she feels the need to do the behavior again, just one more time.

CRAVING
In the context of mental disorders, cravings, or strong desires, are usually for forbidden substances or behaviors. The former include illegal drugs (or sometimes prescription drugs), and legal drugs like nicotine and alcohol. The behavioral category includes hand-washing and eating compulsions, forbidden sexual behavior, and gambling. 

DELIRIUM
Delirium is a severe disturbance in consciousness and thought that is not better accounted for by dementia. Delirium is likely to have a sudden onset, be variable, and have a better chance of remission than dementia. 

DELUSIONS
Fixed beliefs that are not based in reality.  In addition, this fixed belief cannot be changed by someone who provides evidence that it is incorrect.  Typical delusions:  being persecuted (persecutory delusion), being capable of incredible feats (grandiose delusion), etc.

DEMENTIA
The dementias are severe disturbances in thought and memory. The onset of dementia is usually gradual, and, as things stand in the year 2000, most, but not all, cases are irreversible. 

DISORGANIZED BEHAVIOR
Behavior that erratically changes from one type to the next, such as suddenly from happy to angry.  Usually the behavior is extreme, whatever it is, and inappropriate to the situation.

DISORGANIZED SPEECH
Speech that erratically changes from one subject to the next.  It may be nonsensical or not, but it is unrelated to the situation.  Inhibits the person's ability to communicate and to make his/herself understood.

DISSOCIATIVE DISORDERS
The essential feature of dissociative disorders is a splitting, or dissociation. The splitting may be a splitting off of part of memory, in which case the victim loses a period of time or  memories of a specific topic; it may be of the personality, in which case the person may seem to have multiple identities; or it may be a splitting from the environment, in which the person no longer seems to be "in the world." 

DSM-IV
(Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition).  The DSM-IV is the reference book used by mental health professionals in the United States and in other countries to diagnose mental health disorders.  Because of this, we used it as the basis for our descriptions of the various mental health disorders on this site. The diagnoses in DSM-IV were coordinated with those in the International Classification of Diseases-10 (ICD-10) in order to facilitate communication between mental health professionals in different countries. We rearranged the presentation slightly to make it easier for you to find information on our web site, but nearly all of the Disorders in DSM-IV are, or will be, indexed on this web site.

DYS-
Dys is a syllable meaning "ill" or "bad" that combines with other elements that specify what it is that is bad; for example, dystonia means bad muscle tone, which sometimes occurs as spasms that result from taking antipsychotic medications. Ego-dystonic refers to conditions that the person finds unpleasant, or inconsistent with his or her picture of himself or herself. 

DYSSOMNIA
Dyssomnia is the general name for any kind of sleep disorder, whether it involves difficulty getting to sleep, staying asleep, getting restful sleep, or the opposite, difficulty staying awake.

EATING DISORDER
The best-known eating disorders are those of adulthood, anorexia nervosa and bulimia, but there are also serious eating disorders of childhood; pica and rumination are the most dramatic examples.

ECHOLALIA
Echolalia is speech that echoes what was just heard; echolalia occurs frequently in autistic children. 

FACTITIOUS
Artificial or contrived; hence a factitious disorder is "made up," not genuine.

GAMMA-AMINOBUTYRIC ACID (GABA)
GABA is a neurotransmitter that usually inhibits brain activity. The primary action of most benzodiazepines is that they enhance the effects of GABA. 

GENERIC DRUGS
Generic drugs are drugs whose "copyright" has expired. The names reflect the chemical structure of the drug, but they are not formal chemical names. The same drug, once it is eligible for generic status, may be manufactured under different brand names by different companies. 

HALLUCINATIONS
Perceptions of something that is not real.  For example, the person hears voices others cannot hear (auditory hallucinations), sees things others cannot see (visual hallucinations), smells odors others cannot smell (olfactory hallucinations), feels he/she is being touched by something others cannot see, or tastes something he/she has not ingested.

HYPERSOMNIA
means sleeping too much. 

HYPERVIGILANCE
A person who is hypervigilant is extremely anxious and worried that something bad will happen.  He/she therefore is excessively aware of his/her surroundings, so as to "catch" the harm that is approaching.

HYPNOANXIOLYTICS (see antianxiety drugs)

IDEAS OF REFERENCE
Involve the belief that one is the point of reference for whatever surrounds us.  Typically, a person with ideas of reference believes that the people that are talking on television or the radio are speaking directly him/her, or that people, even strangers, are talking about him or her, although other types are also found. 

INAPPROPRIATE AFFECT
When a person's emotional state is not related to the situation, he/she is said to have inappropriate affect.  For example, the person may laugh in the presence of pain or suffering.  

INSOMNIA
is difficulty in sleeping.

MOOD
"Mood" usually connotes a longer-term emotional tone than does "affect." Mood may also be taken to mean a more internal and less observable state than affect. When we say we're in a bad mood, we mean that our state has endured for a while and makes our experience of external events more negative; a "good mood" does the opposite. Depressed people have enduring sad, negative, often guilt-ridden, moods. 

MONOAMINE OXIDASE INHIBITORS (MAOIs)
Monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) increase  the activity of serotonin by preventing its breakdown by monoamine oxidase. Thus these anti-depressants increase neural activity by inhibiting an inhibitor of serotonin. 

NEGATIVE SYMPTOMS
Refers to symptoms of schizophrenia.  Negative symptoms involve absence of behaviors or "less" of the behaviors.  Examples are flat affect, apathy, less movement, or social isolation.

OBSESSIONS
Thoughts/worries that one cannot get out of one's head.  The obsession occupies the person's thoughts constantly.  The person may find that engaging in certain behaviors calms the obsession, and therefore begins to have compulsions.  For example, a person obsessed with germs cannot function in his/her daily life because every activity is evaluated as to the danger of being exposed to germs.  Such individuals may engage in frequent hand washing (a compulsion) to calm the thoughts and worries about germs.

PANIC ATTACKS
Panic attacks are experiences of great fear, accompanied by physiological changes like rapid respiration, heart rate, high blood pressure, flushing, and sweating. The attacks may be precipitated by either real or imaginary events, but in either case are abnormally extreme reactions to the situation.

PARANOIA
When a person is suspicious of people and situations, and that suspiciousness has no basis in reality, he/she is said to be experiencing paranoia. Paranoia involves paranoid ideas (paranoid ideation) that is delusional (see "delusions").

PARAPHILIA
A paraphilia is a sexual practice that is socially prohibited. 

PHOBIAS
Phobias are abnormal fears of specific situations, usually those in which the phobic individual would not feel a sense of control. Examples include fear of being in enclosed spaces (claustrophobia) and its opposite, fear of being in open places (agoraphobia). 

POSITIVE SYMPTOMS
Refers to symptoms of schizophrenia.  Positive symptoms are exaggerations of normal functioning or occurrence of behaviors that should not be occurring.  Positive symptoms include disorganized speech and behavior, delusions, hallucinations, etc.  As you can see, positive does not mean "good" in this case, it means "present," or "noticeable."

PROGNOSIS
The prognosis for a mental problem is its expected course and outcome.

PSYCHOSIS
Most definitions of psychosis require a diagnosis of severe functional impairment that follows a more normal adjustment; schizophrenia is the classical form of psychosis, but delirium and the dementias would also be included as psychotic reactions according to most definitions. Mental retardation, although it may involve severe functional impairment, is not regarded as a psychosis unless it is accompanied by psychotic symptoms like hallucinations or delusions. 

SCHIZOPHRENIA
Schizophrenia is a severe form of psychosis whose symptoms often include hallucinations, delusions, disorganized speech and behavior, illogical thought, social withdrawal, and inappropriate affect. To be diagnosed with schizophrenia, the person must have been disturbed for at least 6 months. 

SEROTONIN   
Serotonin is an excitatory neurotransmitter whose activity is regulated by serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SRIs) and serotonin-specific reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs); these drugs have an anti-depressant effect because they decrease the clearing of serotonin from the synaptic area, and thus increase its activity. Similarly, monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) increase  the activity of serotonin by preventing its breakdown by monoamine oxidase. 

THOUGHT DISORDER
A person is said to be thought disordered when others cannot follow his/her train of thought because it is not logical.

                                                                                                                                Last updated  12/19/03