A little nervous, and very scared, I slowly made my way to the front desk to announce the name of the patient. "Mr. X, will you please come up to the front desk." His back stooped, Mr. X shows up a few seconds later as I studied his disheveled hair and food stains on his shirt, taking note of his appearance, movement and affect. We make our way to the alcove and I sit down across from his chair. Never had I felt so uncomfortable. But as soon as I received the answer to my first question, all my anxiety and fear drifted away.
"So what brings you in Mr. X," I asked. "Well, I haven't really been sleeping well. You see, ever since my birth, I've had this power given to me to take on the world's problems and make sure that I help people everyday, and not just people from this planet, but the planet I hail from as well as other universes too." Clearly, I would not be doing most of the talking. It didn't stop there. I quickly learned that my patient had been brought to this planet in a spaceship by his real parents to save this earth from all evils in 30,000 B.C., since then he has been carrying the troubles of mankind on his shoulders as he tries to rescue good from bad. His own children had become victims of the devil. Mr. X would hear voices of Jesus Christ telling him to act well and give him power. He had a girlfriend, one from another planet, that came to him to borrow money since he had the ability to create money from nothing. He could speak 26 different languages, his Russian was along the lines of "ahoo hee haa haaa hooo heee haaaa." All this and much more was found out in the first 2 minutes of the interview. This, my friends, is called pressured speech with tangential thoughts. You think you're talkative? Wait till you talk to someone with pressured speech, just get them started on a topic and you can sit there for the next hour waiting to interrupt.
What seemed like minutes, turned into an hour and then more. I began to make sense of the terms that I had read in psychiatry under the schizophrenia section. Schizophrenia falls under psychotic disorders. What is psychosis? Medically, it is defined as a disruption in the perception of reality-and symptoms include: delusions, hallucinations, or disorganized thought. Listed below are brief explanations of each of these symptoms:
- Delusions: illogical beliefs that are held despite evidence of being fake & are inconsistent to a person's background/culture
- Hallucinations: sensory perceptions in the absence of any sort of stimulus
- Disorganized thoughts: thoughts that are disorganized...duh. haha just joking; this will include illogical answers to questions, thought derailment, tangentiality, etc.
So in my patient, he had several bizarre delusions: one of which was that he came from another planet, he was saving the world, his children were victims of the devil. His hallucinations were auditory commands since he claimed to be hearing the voice of Jesus Christ. In addition, his thoughts were disorganized, he constantly jumped from one topic to another (tangentiality) and never really finished his thoughts. This patient also presented grandiosity (unrealistic sense of superiority)--he was able to make money, he spoke 26 languages, etc.
All in all, psych has surprisingly turned out to be very helpful, and I'm so glad to have had this experience. A major lesson I learned, and want to emphasize here, is the importance of one's childhood and the drastic impact it has on the rest of your life. Many of the patients admitted into our service, whether its for depression, psychosis, or bipolar disorder, a recurring theme I've noticed is the lack of stability in their childhood years. This includes anything from having abusive people in one's life [physical or sexual] to not seeing one's parents often because they're always working. One of the docs explained how children that were not held and cradled in the first three months of life are more likely to develop psychiatric problems later down the road...
[reference to be found still...]. So, to all the parents out there, take some time out for your kid, play ball, or even just a daily hug can go so far.
Enough for tonight. Will update on more stuff I see super soon...
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