Types and signs of thinking disorders in psychology

Each person lives according to an individual scenario for reflecting reality. One may see a desert, another an island of flowers among the sand, for some the sun is shining, but for others it seems not bright enough. The fact that each person sees the same situation differently depends on an important mental process - thinking. We analyze, evaluate, compare, and perform mathematical operations thanks to it.

Many specialists study the characteristics of thinking, most often psychologists and psychiatrists. In psychology, there are many different tests that have validity and reliability. Diagnostics of thinking are carried out to determine violations, as well as to search for methods of developing thinking. On the basis of psychiatric knowledge, pathological thought processes can be identified. After this, medical assistance is organized for people who experience pathological functioning of this mental process. What kind of thinking disorders can be observed?

What is the norm of a mental process reflecting reality?

To this day, many experts argue about how to correctly define the complex mental process of thinking. But so far there has not been a complete and meaningful thesis that would illuminate all the work that it carries out in our consciousness. This mental process is part of the intellect along with others (memory, imagination, attention and perception). Thinking transforms all information received from the outside, translating it into the plane of subjective perception of the environment around a person. A person can express a subjective model of reality with the help of language, speech, and this distinguishes him from other living beings. It is thanks to speech that a person is called the highest intelligent individual.

Perceiving various situations, with the help of speech a person expresses his conclusions and shows the logic of his judgments. Normal thinking processes must meet several criteria.

• A person must adequately perceive and process all information that comes to him from the outside.
• The assessment of a person must be within the framework of empirical foundations accepted in society.
• There is a formal logic that largely reflects the norms and laws of the entire society. Conclusions about any situation should be based on this logic.
• Thinking processes must proceed in accordance with the laws of system regulation.
• Thinking should not be primitive; it is complexly organized, therefore it normally reflects most of the concepts of the generally accepted structure of the world.

These criteria do not fit all people into the general rules of existence. No one has canceled the individuality of a person. We are talking about the majority as the norm. An elementary example: many people believe that eating after 21.00 is harmful, so everyone who has dinner later is not within the normal range. But in general this is not considered a deviation. So it is with thinking. There may be some incompatibilities with the generally accepted structure of the world by formal logic, unless these are gross violations of thinking.

Symptoms of schizophrenia

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A symptom is a sign of a disease, a syndrome is a set of signs of a disease. Schizophrenia syndromes are divided into positive, negative and cognitive.

Positive syndromes

Hallucinations

Hallucinations are disturbances in the sensory perception of the environment, that is, certain sensations that are present regardless of real stimuli. Hallucinations can be auditory, visual, olfactory, gustatory and tactile. Hallucinations are also divided into simple (bells, noise, phrases) and complex (speech, various scenes).

There are pseudohallucinations when a person’s own thoughts acquire a “sound” and are perceived as something foreign. The most common hallucinations are auditory. In auditory hallucinations, people hear “voices” either inside or outside the head. In most cases, the “voices” are perceived so vividly that the patient does not have the slightest doubt about their reality.

“Voices” can argue with each other, comment on what is happening, and occasionally the “voice” can command the patient. Such imperative voices are considered unfavorable, since patients may obey their instructions and do things that are dangerous to themselves and others.

Signs of auditory and visual hallucinations:

• self-talk; • sudden silence, as if a person is listening to something; • causeless laughter; • inability to concentrate on the topic of conversation or a specific task; • the impression that your relative hears or sees something that you do not perceive.

Rave

Delusions are persistent beliefs or conclusions that do not correspond to reality. Delusional ideas cannot be influenced by reasonable arguments. In schizophrenia, delirium is one of the main manifestations of psychosis (exacerbation of the disease). Only 20% of patients with schizophrenia do not show any manifestations of delusion or delusional perception of surrounding reality throughout their lives. In schizophrenia, delusions can be different in content: delusions of relation, persecution, influence.

Delusions of relation are probably the most common variant of delusions in schizophrenia. According to some authors, it is detected in almost 70% of people suffering from this mental disorder. It intuitively seems to the patient that everything that happens around is not accidental, he is in the center of everything that happens, and everything has to do with him: words, actions, expressions on the faces of other people, their gestures.

Delusions can also arise in the form of ideas of grandeur, jealousy, reformism, litigiousness, religious experiences, delusions of special treatment, when the patient believes that everyone around him has a negative attitude towards him, hypochondriacal delusions, in which a physically healthy person is convinced that he is suffering from some incurable disease. illness.

Disorganization of thinking and speech

In schizophrenia, a disorder such as cessation of thinking often occurs. Patients perceive this condition as a “failure or loss of thoughts.” Stopping thinking is probably associated not only with the pathology of the thinking process, but also with memory impairment. The patient may forget why he began his speech, what he wanted to say, and what was said before. It may also be forgotten why this or that object that the patient picked up was needed, and what the purpose of this object is. The thoughts of a patient with schizophrenia can become confused, suddenly break off, and if the course of the disease is unfavorable, thinking becomes illogical. Often patients show a tendency towards abstraction and symbolism.

Depersonalization and derealization

Schizophrenia is characterized by distortion of the boundaries between “I” and the outside world; most often they are erased. Thoughts and body parts may feel not only changed, but also foreign, the world may seem unreal, strangers may be mistaken for close relatives, and vice versa.

Depersonalization is a disorder of personality, self-awareness, mental self, and occurs quite often in schizophrenia. Depersonalization includes several phenomena: reincarnation, disappearance of the mental “I” and the surrounding world, merging with the world.

In schizophrenia, derealization syndrome may also occur. Derealization is characterized by an altered perception of the surrounding reality: colors or sounds may seem brighter or qualitatively changed, insignificant features of ordinary things are more significant than the entire object as a whole or the general situation. The environment can be perceived as something artificial, similar to a film where people play their roles.

Negative syndromes

Currently, a distinction is made between primary negative symptoms, which arise as a result of the disease itself, and secondary negative symptoms, which most often develop as a result of therapy with psychotropic drugs or on the basis of positive symptoms.

In the literature on the negative symptoms of schizophrenia, the latter is described as “loss of energy”, “loss of motivation”, “decreased level of activity and initiative”, “impoverishment of thoughts and speech”, “limitation of physical activity”, “narrowing of interests”, “weakening emotional reactivity." Indeed, a patient with schizophrenia is passive, taciturn, usually answers questions after significant pauses, briefly and laconically.

Modern psychiatrists classify the following as negative symptoms:

• passivity (weakening of volitional activity, lack of spontaneity); • autism (asociality, unwillingness to cooperate, narrowing of interests). People with autism find it difficult to make new acquaintances and engage in dialogue. Often, people suffering from schizophrenia have a narrower circle of friends and acquaintances. • weak emotional expression (facial and vocal inexpressiveness); • inhibition of movements; • poverty of speech; • inability to make decisions quickly (tendency to make stereotypical decisions); • inability to maintain a conversation (lack of contact with the interlocutor).

Decreased mental activity

With schizophrenia, there is often a decrease in the ability to concentrate and attention, and perceive new information. This often makes it impossible to continue studying or working at the same level.

Volitional disorders are a decrease in motivation and motivation to act, lack of initiative. Often, patients with schizophrenia stop taking care of themselves and prefer to spend all their time at home.

Neurocognitive deficit

Neuropsychological research reveals various disorders of memory, attention and thinking in patients with schizophrenia.

Attention disturbance:

• lability; • difficulty concentrating; • narrowing the volume, focus of attention; • rapid depletion; • poor switchability; • deficit of selective attention.

Thinking disorder:

• violation of figurative and abstract thinking; • emphasis on minor details; • symbolism; • neologisms; • perseveration (repetition of a phrase); • meaningless rhymes; • agglutination (fusion) of concepts.

Speech disorders:

• deviation from the topic; • sudden stops; • speed impairment (“speech fluency”); • penchant for abstract words; • brevity of statements; • decrease in vocabulary; • limited use of conjunctions and prepositions; • lack of initiative at the beginning of the conversation; • reasoning; • answers “tangentially”; • inconsistency and incoherence of speech; • perseveration.

Executive dysfunction:

• lack of initiative, delayed initiation of action, difficulty in initially collecting information; • difficulty planning a sequence of actions (impaired working memory); • difficulty constructing a scheme for solving a problem (impaired abstract thinking); • insufficient self-control (impaired selective attention); • delayed and delayed responses to questions (slower psychomotor speed, decreased verbal fluency); • difficulty switching to another activity.

Memory impairments:

• violations of non-verbal memory; • violations of verbal memory; • violations of short-term memory (short-term storage of information); • impairment of long-term memory; • violation of episodic memory (a type of memory that stores information about integral events and the connections between them); • impairment of working memory (a type of memory that determines the ability to “keep in mind” small pieces of information necessary for momentary mental activity); • impairment of associative memory; • impairment of autobiographical memory.

Psychomotor syndromes

Catatonia is a syndrome characterized by stupor with rigidity (a sustained increase in muscle tone) or, conversely, muscle compliance, a decrease in the number of spontaneous movements and activity. This state may alternate with periods of anxiety, increased activity, so-called catatonic agitation.

Catatonia is characterized by the following symptoms: immobility (convulsive muscle tension), mutism (silence), refusal to eat, fixed gaze, rigidity, freezing in monotonous positions (“waxy flexibility” or catalepsy), negativism (unmotivated resistance to any demands or attempts to change position body), echo phenomena (imitation of the actions of others).

Affective syndromes (mood disorders)

Depression

Depression, accompanied by self-blame and suicidal thoughts, is common in schizophrenia, especially in its early stages. Approximately 40% of patients with schizophrenia make a suicide attempt during their lifetime, and in 10-20% it is successful. Even if it is possible to eliminate most of the symptoms of depression in patients with schizophrenia, this does not mean that the threat of suicide has passed. Suicidal thoughts with this disease go away relatively late.

Risk factors for suicide in schizophrenia:

• young age; • male gender; • cases of suicide attempts in the past; • first psychotic episode; • predominance of positive symptoms over negative ones; • depression; • imperative auditory hallucinations, panic attacks; • frequent cases of hospitalization; • the first 3 months after discharge from the hospital; • resistant variants of the disease; • pronounced side effects of therapy, inadequate; drug therapy (low or high doses of drugs); • medications believed to increase the risk of suicide (fluoxetine, duloxetine); • drug abuse; • insufficient social support; • economic problems; • high level of intelligence.

Diagnostic methods

In order to determine the logic, flexibility, depth, criticality of thinking, how developed its types are, there are many ways to study this mental process. Doctors practice more examination at the organic level; diagnosis of thinking disorders is carried out using generally accepted medical equipment. They look through machines, look for pathological foci, conduct an MRI, an encephalogram, and so on. Psychologists use test materials in their work. Diagnosis of thinking in psychology can also be carried out using planned observation and natural or laboratory experiments. The most common tests for determining the characteristics of mental activity: the “Elimination of Concepts” technique, the Bennett test, the study of rigidity of thinking, and so on. To determine thinking disorders in children, you can use “Divide into groups”, “Trace the outline”, “Find the differences”, “Maze” and others.

Reasons for violations

There can be many reasons for disturbances in the complex mental process that reflects reality in our consciousness. Even now, experts have not come to a consensus about some pathological disorders in human thinking. They arise due to organic damage, psychoses, neuroses, and depression. Let's consider the reasons for the main deviations.

1. Cognitive disorders. They make the quality of mental operations low. These disorders can occur at different levels of organization of the human body. At the cellular level, they prevent the patient from adequately perceiving the surrounding reality, which is followed by incorrect decisions about what is happening. These are pathologies such as Alzheimer's disease (dementia due to organic damage to the blood vessels of the brain), schizophrenia. When the temporal lobes of the brain are damaged, memory and thinking are impaired, which does not allow a person to perform usual activities, organize and classify objects. With poor vision, a person receives distorted information, so his judgments and conclusions may not correspond to the realities of life.
2. Pathologies of forms of thinking originate from psychoses. At the same time, a person is not able to organize information based on the generally accepted logic of things, and therefore makes unrealistic conclusions. Here there is a fragmentation of thoughts, the absence of any connections between them, as well as the perception of information according to external criteria, there is no associative connection between situations or objects.
3. Thought content disorders. Due to the weakness of the perception system (in particular, the transformation of external stimuli), a “skew” of emphasis occurs from real events to events that the subject has identified as having great value for him.
4. Insufficiency of systemic regulation. A person’s thinking is structured in such a way that in a problem situation he looks for ways out based on previous experience and processing information in a given period of time. Normally, systemic regulation helps a person abstract from surrounding discomfort, look at the problem from the outside, ask himself questions and look for constructive answers at the same time, and create a general plan of action. If this regulation is lacking, a person cannot quickly and effectively find a way out of the current situation. Such thinking disorders can be due to emotional overload, trauma, brain tumors, toxic lesions, inflammation in the forehead.

Thinking disorders in schizophrenia

A mental illness that is characterized by a gross disorder of interaction with the surrounding reality is called schizophrenia. The condition of patients with schizophrenia may be accompanied by inappropriate behavior, various hallucinations and delusional judgments. This disease is characterized by the disintegration of the internal unity of feelings and will; in addition, there is a violation of memory and thinking, as a result of which the sick individual cannot adequately adapt to the social environment.

Schizophrenia is characterized by a chronic progressive course and is hereditary in nature.

The described mental illness has a destructive effect on the personality of the subjects, changing it beyond recognition. Most people associate schizophrenia with hallucinations and delusional judgments, but in fact, these symptoms are completely reversible, but there are no changes in thought processes and emotional sphere.

Psychology considers thinking disorders to be the most common symptom of mental illness, in particular schizophrenia. When diagnosing a mental illness, psychiatrists are often guided by the presence of one or more types of pathology of mental activity.

The main disorders of thinking are of a formal nature and consist in the loss of associative connections. In individuals suffering from schizophrenia, it is not the meaning of judgments that changes, but the logical internal connections of judgments. In other words, it is not the decomposition of concepts that occurs, but a disruption of the generalization process, in which patients develop many fleeting, undirected associations that reflect very general connections. As the disease progresses, patients' speech changes and becomes interrupted.

Schizophrenics are characterized by the so-called “slipping,” which consists of a sharp, inconsistent transition from one idea to another judgment. Patients are not able to notice such “slipping” on their own.

In patients’ thoughts, “neologisms” often appear, that is, they come up with new pretentious words. Thus, ataxic (non-specific) thinking manifests itself.

Also, schizophrenics experience fruitless philosophizing, loss of concreteness and generalization of speech, and loss of coordination between phrases. Patients give phenomena and other people's statements their own secret meaning.

According to experiments conducted in comparison with the results of healthy individuals, schizophrenics are better at recognizing stimuli that are less expected, and worse at recognizing stimuli that are more expected. As a result, there is fog, vagueness, and intricacy in the mental activity of patients, which provokes disturbances in mental processes in schizophrenia. Such individuals cannot determine the significant connections that exist between objects, do not identify minor specific situational properties, but actualize rather general ones that do not reflect the real situation, often superficial, fleeting, formal features.

In schizophrenia, the main disorders of thinking cannot be considered without taking into account the holistic life of the individual. Impaired thinking and personality disorders are interconnected.

In schizophrenia, impaired memory and thinking, attention disorders, can also be detected. But in the absence of organic changes in the brain, these pathologies are consequences of a disorder of mental activity.

Types of pathological thinking

There are quite a lot of pathologies of mental activity, since this process is multifaceted. There is a classification of disorders that unites all the properties and varieties of the mental process that reflects reality. Types of thinking disorders are as follows:

1. Pathology of the dynamics of thinking.
2. Violations of the motivational part of the thought process.
3. Operational irregularities.

Pathologies of the operational side of the mental process

These violations affect the process of generalizing concepts. Because of this, the logical connections between them in a person’s judgments suffer; direct judgments, ideas about objects and various situations come first. Patients cannot choose from the many signs and properties of an object the most suitable for its most accurate description. Most often, such pathological processes occur in people with mental retardation, epilepsy, and encephalitis.

Violations of this type may also be characterized by a distortion of the generalization process. In this case, the sick person does not take into account the properties of the object, which are significantly related to each other. Only random characteristics are selected; there is no connection between objects and phenomena based on the generally accepted cultural level. This disorder of thinking is observed in schizophrenia and psychopathy.

Disorganization of thinking and speech

A characteristic and specific positive disorder in schizophrenia is considered to be “disconnected thinking.” According to E. Bleuler, it is “split,” like all other aspects of the patient’s mental sphere, and is the result of “loosening associative connections.” “In associations, the unified is split, the heterogeneous is united; it happens as if we mixed different concepts of one category and then began to combine them completely randomly” (Bleuler E., 1911); “a break occurs, illogical, incoherent, and sometimes completely meaningless combinations take place” (Gurevich M.O., Sereysky M.Ya., 1946).

The prognosis in the presence of disorganized thinking is usually unfavorable. “Formal and significant disorders of thinking are combined into one general onslaught towards the destruction of the personality. The only strange thing is the undisturbed peacefulness with which these diverse circles of ideas share among themselves the possession of specific phases - the Self. This disintegration of a skillful mental edifice into “many sentient and thinking organisms” constitutes the last stage of a mental disorder that has reached the point of incurability” (Schüle G., 1880).

Some psychiatrists recognized disorganization of thinking and speech as an independent group of syndromes, as opposed to positive and negative symptoms. However, a careful psychopathological and neuropsychological analysis shows that this set of syndromes is heterogeneous and some of them can be attributed to positive symptoms, and some to signs of neurocognitive deficit.

In some forms of schizophrenia, thinking loses its coherence, loses flexibility, becomes fuzzy, uneven (“thoughts quickly come and go, moving from one object to another,” “run into each other, intersect and collide”), stereotypical, overly abstract, intermittent (“thought breaks”), illogical and inadequate to a specific situation.

Images and fragments of thoughts can follow each other without any logical connection. “These phenomena are very reminiscent of the expressions sometimes found in subjects suffering from paraphasia, and to an even greater extent those conversations that we usually see in a dream ... obviously, both here and there we are talking about a long-term or temporary loss of the ability to correctly combine between representations and their sound images" (Krepelin E., 1891).

Despite some similarities between disorganized thinking and the symptom of “jumping ideas,” these psychopathological phenomena differ from each other, since the connection between the associations of a patient with schizophrenia is broken, in contrast to their enhanced formation in manic syndrome.

One of the differential diagnostic criteria for thinking disorders in schizophrenia and manic syndrome that has developed within the framework of bipolar affective, possibly schizoaffective, disorder is the fact that in the latter cases the patient usually returns to the thought with which he began his reasoning, in contrast to a person with schizophrenia who is usually unable to complete a thought once started.

In schizophrenia, there is a stoppage of thinking (“blockage”, sperrung) - an episodic state of its blockade. Subjectively, patients perceive this condition as “a failure or loss of thoughts.” This disorder is probably associated not only with pathology of the thinking process, but also with memory impairment. The patient may forget why he began his speech, “what and how he should have done, why this or that object was needed, what its purpose was ...”, “... he forgets what he wanted to say and what was said before” (Zhmurov V. A., 2008).

Associations are fragmented and “weak.” It is difficult for a person with schizophrenia to maintain the topic set by the interlocutor, usually due to weak associations or “thought slippage.” For an external observer, the speech of a patient with schizophrenia is often incomprehensible and lacks logical meaning.

The speech of a patient with schizophrenia may be fragmented and include neologisms, alliteration, meaningless rhymes, and perseverations. There are breaks in thoughts, their sudden stop. It is interesting to note that often “a completely meaningless set of broken schizophrenic associations is usually combined by the patient into a grammatically correct sentence (Gurevich M.O., Sereysky M.Ya., 1946) and represents “preservation of form without content.” V.A. Zhmurov (2008) cites the meaningless dialogue between the plaintiff and the defendant in the book “Gargantua and Pantagruel” by Francois Rabelais as an illustration of the fragmentation of thinking.

perseverations, or speech stereotypes, from perseverations in the broad sense of the word (speech, motor, sensory stereotypes, rigidity, weak ability to switch, etc.). Liemann (1905) at one time distinguished between clonic, tonic and intentional variants of perseverations. Sandson and Albert (1984) found characteristic features of perseverations in the disorganization of thinking and speech, in turn dividing them into “current perseverations,” “stuck in set” perseverations and “returning perseverations.”

Perseverations are considered by modern schizophrenia researchers as a symptom of damage to the prefrontal parts of the brain and its dorsolateral areas. In addition, perseverations are often found in frontal-subcortical and mesolimbic disorders.

Some authors describe perseverations as examples of prefrontal disorders, which should be understood not as focal disorders with a specific neuroanatomical substrate, but as changes in the relationships between distant brain regions.

Many schizophrenia researchers believe that perseverations should be classified as positive symptoms because they show a positive correlation with hallucinations and disorganized thinking (formal thought disorder).

In addition to perseverations, disorganization of thinking can be manifested by a penchant for symbolism , often confusing and fixed on a sexual theme. At the same time, the connection between the symbol and the object is completely incomprehensible and unmotivated.

For patients with schizophrenia, reasoning (according to some authors, “tangential thinking”) , in which logical connections are replaced by loosely connected relationships of words: “there is an emptiness of thoughts, covered from the outside by the gloss of previous life forms, once quite meaningful habits... in very educated patients this gloss of form easily blinds and masks the internal emptiness of content" (Neumann W., 1878). The statements of patients can be verbose, pointless, florid and meaningful. Reasoning is often found in paraphrenic syndrome.

In schizophrenia, a kind of “intellectual ambivalence” is noted - at the same time, the polar opposite of concepts and ideas is combined.

Patients can merge concepts and images that are completely unrelated to each other (“concept agglutination”).

According to some authors of the mid-twentieth century, the absence of target ideas entails an influx of side, random ideas into the consciousness, which leads to fragmented thinking.

In the literature devoted to the disorganization of thinking and speech, one can find information about the “over-inclusivity” of patients with schizophrenia, which is manifested by insufficiently stable conceptual boundaries. In this case, there is a lack of clarity of thinking due to the intrusion of extraneous or distant associations into the patient’s speech (WHO, 1997).

In 1997, Chua found a significant positive correlation between mental disorganization and the relative volumes of the hippocampus and fusiform gyrus. The works of McIntosh et al. (2001) found a positive correlation between the severity of “disorganization” and the volume of the temporal lobes (these researchers also determined the relationship between euphoria and increased size of the thalamus). Somewhat earlier, Shenton et al (1992) noted that the degree of disorganization of thinking correlates with the volume of gray matter in the left posterior part of the superior temporal gyrus.

From the point of view of neurochemical processes, perseveration is associated with increased activity of the dopaminergic system. It is known that movement patterns can be observed after taking amphetamine, methylphenidate or apomorphine.

Some authors have reported an increase in verbal perseveration in patients with schizophrenia after taking methylphenidate and a decrease in it as a result of taking an antipsychotic (haloperidol). Resonance, on the contrary, is typical of reduced activity of the dopaminergic system (“decreased catecholaminergic tone”), a condition quite typical for patients who have difficulty maintaining a pattern of sequence of thoughts and actions.

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Disorders affecting the dynamics of thinking

The diversity of the pace of mental activity, consistency and spontaneity characterize the dynamics of the process, which subjectively reflects reality. There are several signs indicating a violation of the dynamic side of thinking.

• Slipping. With normal and consistent reasoning about something, without losing generalization, patients begin to talk about completely different things. They may slip into another topic without completing the previous one, thinking in inappropriate associations or rhymes. At the same time, taking such reservations as the norm. Because of this process, the normal and logical train of thought is disrupted.
• Responsiveness. The process by which the patient responds to all external stimuli. At first he can reason critically and adequately, but then perceive all absolutely irritants as addressed to him, consider the objects at hand to be animate, which necessarily require help or his participation. Such people may lose orientation in space and time.
• Inconsistency. The sick person is characterized by inconsistent judgments. At the same time, all the basic properties of thinking are preserved. A person may inconsistently express logical judgments, analyze and generalize. This pathology is very common in people with vascular diseases, brain injuries, MDP, and also this disorder of thinking in schizophrenia, but it accounts for about 14% of the total number of diseases.
• Inertia. With the functions and properties of the thought process intact, the pace of actions and judgments is noticeably slower. It is extremely difficult for a person to switch to another action, goal, or act out of habit. Inertia often occurs in people with epilepsy, MDS, epileptoid psychopathy, and can also accompany depressive, apathetic, and asthenic conditions.
• Acceleration. Ideas and judgments that arise too quickly, which even affect the voice (it can become hoarse due to the constant flow of speech). With this pathology, increased emotionality occurs: when a person tells something, he gesticulates too much, gets distracted, picks up and expresses low-quality ideas and associative connections.

Signs

Pathologies of thinking in psychology are accompanied by the following symptoms:

1. Inertia - the processes of forming associations occur extremely slowly. A person cannot answer the question posed for a long time, speech slows down, and there is a long pause between words.
2. Acceleration - speech expressions and associations arise very quickly. Thoughts are not connected to each other, which makes a person difficult to understand. During a conversation, active gestures appear.
3. Inconsistency – Inconsistent judgments often occur. At the same time, erroneous and correct thoughts alternate with each other. The person continues to sensibly assimilate information and facts.
4. Slips - People who suffer from schizophrenia often deviate from their chosen line of reasoning. They often make mistakes and return to the original topics.
5. Responsiveness - if the disease takes a severe form, the patient begins to name visible objects by hearing. At the same time, a person cannot navigate in space, forgets important things, dates, names.
6. Generalization distortion. The patient is unable to make logical connections between individual objects. In this case, objects are combined into separate groups only by shape, material or color.
7. Reducing the level of generalization. A sick person cannot correctly generalize symptoms. It is difficult for him to determine the characteristic properties that connect similar objects, but he names their features.
8. Reasoning is manifested by prolonged, aimless reasoning. Moreover, the proposed judgments are not supported by any ideas. Long threads of reasoning are constantly broken and may have no connection at all.
9. Diversity - there is no purposefulness in the actions of a person with such a disorder. He cannot detect differences between objects, but at the same time he perceives advice.
10. Delirium - numerous ideas arise that cannot be implemented in the real world. The patient tries to renounce reality, which is why he enters a delusional state. At the same time, the individual is completely confident in the adequacy of his judgments and does not perceive the opinions of others.
11. Uncritical - thought processes are incomplete, superficial. At the same time, thoughts cannot move purposefully. Uncontrollable behavior may occur.
12. Obsession is accompanied by emerging phobias and experiences that cannot be controlled from a healthy point of view. In addition to this, a personality disorder may occur.

Signs can appear individually or collectively.

What does personality disorder mean?

For people with deviations in the personal component of thinking, the thinking disorders described below are characteristic.

• Diversity. Any value, judgment, conclusion can be “located” in different planes of thinking. With intact analysis, generalization and comparison, a person’s task can proceed in directions that are in no way connected with each other. For example, knowing that you need to take care of nutrition, a woman can buy the most delicious dishes for her cat, and not for her children. That is, the task and knowledge are adequate, the attitude towards the goal and the fulfillment of the task are pathological.
• Reasoning. The thinking of a person with such a pathology is aimed at “solving global problems.” In another way, this violation is called fruitless reasoning. That is, a person can waste his eloquence, instruct, and express himself in sophisticated ways without any particular reason.
• Ornateness. When a person explains something, he spends a lot of words and emotions for this. Thus, his speech contains unnecessary reasoning that complicates the communication process.
• Amorphous. In other words, this is a violation of logical thinking. At the same time, a person gets confused in concepts and logical connections between them. Strangers cannot understand what he is talking about. This also includes discontinuity, in which there is no connection between individual phrases.

Content of thinking - what is it?

The content of thinking is its essence, that is, the work of the basic properties: comparison, synthesis, analysis, generalization, specification, concept, judgment, inference. In addition, the concept of content includes methods of understanding the world - induction and deduction. Experts also add types to the internal structure of this mental process: abstract, visual-effective and figurative thinking.

A separate class of disorders in which a person’s thinking goes through a path of degradation are pathologies of its content. At the same time, its properties are preserved to some extent, but inadequate judgments, logical connections and aspirations come to the fore in the mind. Pathologies of this class include disorders of thinking and imagination.

Obsessions in a person

These disorders are otherwise called obsessions. Such thoughts arise involuntarily and constantly occupy a person’s attention. They may contradict his value system and not correspond to his life. Because of them, a person is emotionally exhausted, but cannot do anything about them. Obsessive thoughts and ideas are perceived by a person as their own, but due to the fact that most of them are aggressive, obscene, meaningless, a person suffers from their attack. They can arise due to psychotraumatic situations or organic damage to the prefrontal cortex, basal ganglia, and cingulate gyrus.

Lability in psychology

Mental lability, considered in psychology, implies its mobility, and in some cases instability, while science itself studies only this aspect of lability, without going into physiology. In most sources, mental lability is considered as a negative quality that requires correction, but it does not give due credit to the fact that this is the main adaptive mechanism of the psyche. It was the speed of reaction and switching between quickly and often unexpectedly changing events in external life that helped humanity survive. The opposite is mental rigidity, when a person remains constant for a long time, and any changes knock him out of his normal state. Any of these characteristics in its extreme manifestation is negative, but at moderate levels it gives its advantages.

Problems with lability, when a person comes to a psychologist, are associated with frequent changes in mood, while all spectrums are experienced not superficially, but really deeply (i.e., if you feel sad, then you think about opening your veins, and if you are happy, then you want to dance on workplace and give candy to passers-by - and all this within one hour). It is the difficulties in coping with one’s emotions and the lack of understanding of how this can be corrected that brings many not only mental suffering, but the subsequent changes in health, since the autonomic system, being subordinate to emotional states, also increases the level of its lability.

Such phenomena can be justified by the type of organization of the nervous system, for example, in people with a choleric type of temperament, the speed of reactions is already due to nature, and accordingly, increased lability to a pathological state is more likely. Frequent neuroses, psychological trauma received at an early age, and being in traumatic situations at the moment can also provoke mood swings. But we should not exclude physiological reasons that affect a person’s psychological state: brain tumors, TBI, vascular diseases.

Correction of such unpleasant conditions begins with diagnosis and exclusion of physiological causes, then, if necessary, correction is possible with mood-stabilizing drugs (antidepressants and tranquilizers), accompanied by a course of psychotherapy. In severe cases, treatment in a hospital may be appropriate; in the mildest cases, you can cope by visiting a psychologist, without interrupting your usual life.

Super valuable emotional ideas

These are seemingly harmless judgments, but they were identified as a separate pathological process - a disorder of thinking. Psychology and psychiatry work side by side on this problem, since highly valuable ideas can be corrected using psychological methods in the early stages. A person with such a pathology has preserved thinking properties, but at the same time one or a set of ideas that encourage action does not give him peace. It occupies a dominant place among all thoughts in his mind, exhausting a person emotionally and getting stuck in the brain for a long time.

What is lability

In scientific applications, lability is used synonymously with mobility (normally), instability (in pathology) and variability (as a characteristic of the dynamics of a state and processes). To understand the breadth of use of this term, we can consider examples of the fact that there is lability of mood in body temperature, psyche and physiology, and accordingly applies to all processes that have speed, constancy, rhythm, amplitude and other dynamic characteristics in their indicators.

The course of any processes in the body is regulated by the nervous system, therefore, even when talking about indicators of pulse or mood lability, we are still talking about the degree of lability of the nervous system (central or autonomic, depending on the location of the instability). The autonomic nervous system regulates internal organs and systems; accordingly, the general condition of the body depends on its work, the ability to maintain rhythm and stability of processes.

Autonomic lability brings disturbances in the functioning of the heart (manifestations appear in the form of arrhythmia, problems with blood pressure and as vegetative-vascular dystonia), the functioning of the glands (problems with sweating or the production of substances necessary for the quality functioning of the body may begin). Many seemingly psychological problems or those related to the central nervous system are actually solved at the level of reducing autonomic lability, which ensures productive sleep and the absorption of beneficial microelements. At the same time, it is worth remembering that signaling about the level of stress or a critical emotional situation is primarily not the central system, but the autonomic system, by increasing its lability. Mechanisms that activate the work of all organ systems to overcome difficult or extreme situations use the internal reserves of the body, forcing the heart to speed up the rhythm, the lungs to absorb more air, the iron to remove excess adrenaline through sweat, and only then the central nervous system reactions are activated.

Lability of the nervous system or mental lability is characterized by a pathological state of mood disturbance, expressed in its swings and inconstancy. The condition may be the norm for adolescence, but is classified as a spectrum of pathological conditions for adults and requires medical care, as well as the work of a psychologist, even without prescribing medications.