Browsing by Author "Kainulainen, Julia"

Psychosis is a condition in which a person's sense of reality is weakened and he/she has considerable difficulty in distinguishing what is true and what is not. Psychosis includes a number of different symptoms. The most typical symptoms are various hallucinations and delusions, fragmentation of thought and speech and abnormal behavior. For example, schizophrenia, psychotic depression, bipolar disorder, schizoaffective disorder and various personality disorders may include psychotic episodes. In schizophrenia there are significant difficulties in all domains of cognition. Difficulties can be observed in childhood. Children who develop schizophrenia in later years experience difficulties which have been observed as early as age 3. In first grade, their grades are about one standard deviation lower than those of their peers. The cognitive level prior to illness has not been associated with the timing of the illness, so the deficits in cognition can not be explained by pre-symptoms. As psychotic illness progresses, the level of cognitive function remains stable. This hypothesis is supported by most of the research. However, the results are in some respects contradictory. According to some research, cognitive functioning weakens steadily as the illness progresses. Some results have found that cognitive functioning improves as the disease progresses. Similarly, there are contradictory results as to the relationship between psychotic symptoms (positive and negative) and cognitive functioning. Support is most prevalent in the hypothesis that there is no connection between the level of difficulty of psychotic symptoms and cognitive deficits. In psychotic patients, the level of cognitive impairment has a greater effect on overall functional capacity than the symptoms of psychosis. The difficulty of cognitive disorders predicted lower real world functioning more than the difficulty of positive or negative symptoms. In addition to the clinical symptoms of psychosis, it is important to always evaluate cognitive functioning and aim to rehabilitate cognition.