EPA-0651 – The Complexity of Psychopathological Symptom as a Possible Indication of Mental Disease's Etiology

Abstract

Introduction:

In spite of good development of laboratory and instrumental methods of diagnostics of brain and mental disorders, there remains an insufficiency of methods for etiology differentiation, especially clinical-psychopathological in psychiatry.

The aim and objective:

is to evaluate the differential diagnostic's opportunities in estimation of clinical phenomena's complexity for identification of neurotic, organic or endogenous genesis of disorders.

Methods:

expert estimation, statistical.

As the experts 7 certified specialists (psychiatrists, psychologists and others) were involved.

In the research the academically definitions and the clinical case descriptions of the following clinical phenomena were estimated:

1. - Conversion, obsession, neurasthenia, phobia, derealisation/depersonalization, anxiety (partly specific for neurotic, stress-related and somatoform disorders);

2. - True hallucinations, confusion, amnesia, fixation hypomnesia, anecphoria (partly specific for organic mental disorders);

3. - Pseudo hallucinations, delusion of control, automatism, paralogia, emotional withdrawal, autism, ambivalence (common symptoms of schizophrenia);

4. - Inability to feel, sadness, lassitude, euphoria, excitement as the signs of endogenous affective disorders.

5. - Mainly non-specific phenomenon - persecutory delusions.

Thus were obtained 14 estimates for each item on a 100-point scale.

Results:

Dispersion of majority ranges was too high to get significant differences. But 6 from 7 experts significantly (p<0.05) and 1 tendentionally (p<0.01) rated 3 symptoms (autism, conversion and paralogia) as relatively more complex as compared with 7 more simplex phenomena (anxiety, confusion, euphoria, excitement, neurasthenia, phobia and sadness) by U-Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney criteria.

Conclusion:

established ranges of psychopathological phenomena's complexity reveal non-linear relations to etiology but in some cases they can be useful instrument of differential diagnostics of mental disorders.