Positive symptoms
These include hallucinations and delusions. In classic hallucinations, the affected person perceives things via his sensory stimuli (hearing, tasting, smelling, feeling) that are not there. This includes, for example, hearing voices. In a delusion, the psychotic sufferer is convinced that things are true that absolutely cannot be true. These include, above all, conspiracy theories, delusions of persecution, and obsessive religious beliefs.
Negative symptoms
Negative symptoms mainly include lack of drive, social withdrawal, and lack of concentration. Affected individuals lose all drive, curl up and withdraw from friends and family, but can concentrate on a few things and often feel very isolated.
Cognitive symptoms – thinking disorders.
Another symptom of psychosis is thinking disorders. The problem of not being able to grasp a clear thought because you forget in the middle of it what you actually wanted to say is undoubtedly familiar to everyone in certain situations. In psychotic patients, however, this disturbance may be very pronounced. At the same time, those affected find thinking itself very energy- and strength-consuming
I-disorders
The symptoms of ego disorders include depersonalization or derealization, i.e., the person but also other persons, objects, or the spatial environment seem strange, unreal, and changed. An additional symptom is the idea that one’s own thoughts can be manipulated, overheard, or imposed from the outside.
Schizophrenic psychosis
With its many manifestations, so-called schizophrenic psychosis belongs to the endogenous psychoses. This means that it develops “from within” due to various factors without any identifiable physical causes or related events.
One of the many prejudices sufferers have to deal with is the misconception that their personality is split. Only a tiny proportion of people who suffer from psychosis are diagnosed as schizophrenic – the risk of becoming ill is about one percent.
More often, the symptoms of schizophrenic psychosis are accompanied by other mental and physical illnesses, such as bipolar disorder. Therefore, in order to make a precise diagnosis, schizophrenic psychosis and bipolar affective disorder must be differentially diagnosed.