There are four main symptoms associated with a psychotic episode. These are:
Hallucinations
A hallucination is when you think you perceive something that does not exist in reality. Hallucinations can occur in all five of your senses as outlined below.
- Sight - someone with psychosis may see colors and shapes, or imaginary people, or animals.
- Sounds - someone with psychosis may hear voices that are angry, unpleasant, or sarcastic.
- Touch - a common psychotic hallucination is that insects are crawling on the skin.
- Smell - usually a strange, or unpleasant, smell.
- Taste - some people with psychosis have complained of having a constant unpleasant taste in their mouth.
Delusion
A delusion is having an unshakable belief in something that is implausible, bizarre or obviously untrue. There are two common types of psychotic delusion that are described below.
- Paranoid delusion - a person with psychosis will often believe that an individual, or organization, is making plans to hurt, or kill them, which in turn can lead to unusual behavior. For example, a person with psychosis may refuse to be in the same room as a mobile phone because they believe they are actually mind-control devices.
- Delusions of grandeur - in this type of delusion, a person with psychosis believes that they have some imaginary power, or authority. For example, they may think they are president of a country, or that they have the power to bring people back from the dead.
Confusion of thought
People with psychosis often have disturbed, confused, and disrupted patterns of thought. Signs of this include:
- their speech may be rapid and constant,
- the content of their speech appears random; they may switch from one topic to another in mid-sentence, and
- their train of thought may suddenly stop, resulting in an abrupt pause in conversation, or activity.
Lack of insight
People who are experiencing a psychotic episode often totally unaware that their behavior is in any way strange, or that the delusions, or hallucinations, that they are experiencing could be imaginary.
They may be capable of recognising delusional, or bizarre, behavior in others, but lack the self-awareness to recognize it themself. A person with psychosis who is being treated in a psychiatric ward will often complain that all of their fellow patients are mentally ill while they are perfectly normal.
