The Different Types of Psychiatric Disorders

Psychiatric disorder, also known as mental illness, significantly interrupts your cognitive behavior and thinking, causing risk increment of freedom loss, death, pain, or even disability. This disorder is diagnosed by mental health professionals like a:

• Psychologist
• Primary care physician
• Clinical counselor
• Psychiatrist
• Mental health nurse
• Psychiatric pharmacist

Common Signs and Symptoms of Mental Illness

• Suicidal thoughts
• A distinct change in eating habits
• Deep continuous sadness
• Disability to manage problems and day to day stress
• Paranoia
• Enormous violence and hostility
• Strong emotions of fear and guilt

Mental Illness Diagnosis

To come up with a diagnosis, a mental health professional will have to carry out:

• A physical examination – This helps your doctor exclude physical issues that could lead to your symptoms.
• Lab tests – Drug screening and thyroid function test are ordered
• A psychological evaluation – It will involve a conversation with a mental health professional on the behavior patterns, emotions, and thoughts of the patient. A questionnaire may be provided to the patient to be filled out to aid in providing answers to these questions.

Categories of Psychiatric Disorders

They include:

1. Depressive disorders – This covers disorders that interrupt how you feel emotionally, such as levels of happiness and sadness, and how they can interrupt your ability to function. Examples of these disorders include:

• Major depressive disorder (persevering feeling of loss of interest and sadness)
• Premenstrual dysphoric disorder
• Anxiety disorders – It includes generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), phobias (extreme fear of specific things such as darkness and heights), and panic disorder

2. Obsessive-compulsive disorder – Patients with this disorder experience replicating and unwanted obsessions, urge thoughts and feel the drive to respond to the compulsions by taking action. Examples include: Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and trichotillomania (hair-pulling disorder)

3. Feeding disorders – Examples of psychiatric disorders related to eating are:

• Anorexia nervosa – It is characterized by fear of gaining weight, abnormally low body weight, and misleading weight perception.
• Bulimia nervosa – This is a serious life-threatening eating disorder where the patient has no control over what they eat. They take large amounts of food and then get rid of the additional calories in a destructive way.

4. Sleep-wake disorders – Some of the sleep-related disorders include:

• Insomnia – It’s the most common sleep disorder that makes it hard for one to fall asleep or stay asleep.
• Sleep apnea – A condition where breathing frequently stops and starts.
• Narcolepsy – Characterized by sudden sleep attacks and immense daytime drowsiness
• REM (rapid eye movement)

5. Neurocognitive disorders – These are disorders affecting your ability to reason and think and may occur due to traumatic brain damage or Alzheimer’s disease (a condition that leads to atrophy of the brain and death of the brain cells)

6. Personality disorders – Refers to emotional vulnerability and injurious behaviors that disturb social relations and living. Examples include borderline, narcissistic personality disorder (deep need of admiration and exaggerated attention), antisocial behavior.

7. Paraphilic disorders – These are sexual interest and behavior disorders and include:

• Sexual sadism disorder – People with this condition get sexual arousal from humiliation, extreme pain, or the suffering of others.
• Voyeuristic disorder – Sexual arousal by secretly watching a person undress or engage in sexual activity.
• Pedophilic disorder – A person with this disorder gets extreme sexual urges and fantasies in young adolescents.

8. Trauma and stressor-related disorders – Are psychiatric disorders that emerge either in the course of a traumatic experience or after. This include:

• Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
• Dissociative amnesia (forgetting important information about your life)

9. Schizophrenia spectrum – These are psychotic disorders leading to disconnection from reality. Patients with this condition experience disorganized speech and thinking, hallucinations, and delusions.

10. Bipolar disorder – It is a condition that leads to extreme mood change that involves emotional highs (hypomania) and emotional lows (depression).

What is A Psychiatric Emergency?

This is a critical disruption of mood, thought, or behavior of a patient and, if not treated, may lead to harm of the sick individual or to others around them.

Psychiatric emergencies need urgent medical intervention; thus, if you are near the suffering individual, take them to an ER near you.

For freestanding emergency rooms near you and psychiatric emergency care, visit Ascent Emergency Medical Center – an emergency room in Houston, 77030.