Le syndrome de Morpheus : symptômes psychotiques chez une série de cas de patients atteints de la COVID-19

Abstract

During the first wave of the COVID-19 epidemic, the Colmar hospital was at the epicenter of the pandemic in France because of a religious gathering that caused a wave of contamination. In order to face the growing wave of admissions in intensive care, the state in partnership with the army set up the operation MORPHEE aiming at transferring intubated patients to other hospitals. On their return to Alsace, the inter-service liaison psychiatry team was called upon for several of them who presented psychotic disorders on waking up, even though they had no previous psychiatric history, and who had resolved spontaneously. These pictures do not correspond to the delirious pictures usually observed in the ICU, such as “reanimatory black-holes” or “near-death-experience”. No iatrogenic origin was found and the imaging examinations do not allow to explain this picture; therefore, we cannot exclude that this picture could be a neurological manifestation of COVID-19. The disorder appeared to be spontaneously resolving, so we would urge caution about a drug approach to this problem.