Psychotic Mental Disorders Research Articles

Patient violence in a psychiatric hospital in Denmark: Rate of violence and relation to diagnosis

In a 1-year prospective study inpatient violence was investigated in a Danish psychiatric hospital covering a well-defined catchment area with a population of 235,000. Violent acts were recorded on the Staff Observation Aggression Scale. Psychiatric diagnoses were recorded as ICD-8. Six per cent of the inpatients behaved violently. The total rate of violent acts was 1.40 per bed (occupied) per year. For more serious violence it was 0.35. Ninety-three per cent of the violent patients had major (psychotic) mental disorders. Comparisons of violent with nonviolent psychotic patients showed that for both sexes schizophrenia, paranoid type, was strongly associated with violence. Mania was also connected with violence, but significantly only in females. Half of the violent patients had the double diagnoses psychosis pus abuse of alcohol or drugs. The most frequent victims of violence were nursing staff. Most injuries were trivial. The most frequent provoking factors were demands on patients and/or the staff's re...

Prototype decision support system for a differential diagnosis of psychotic, mood, and organic mental disorders: Part II.

This paper presents a prototype parallel-processing decision support system, based on the ALICE graph reduction machine, for the differential diagnosis of psychotic, mood, and organic mental disorders in accordance with the American Psychiatric Association's revised third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The paper extends the authors' earlier work where the same domain was implemented on an expert-system shell using a rule-based representation.

Ego development and DSM-III Axis II: personality disorders.

Investigated the relationship between Loevinger 's levels of ego development and DSM-III Axis II personality disorder diagnoses, with a private psychiatric clinic sample of 400 patients. A breakdown of the ego development levels for each personality disorder is provided. Personality disorders that cluster in the dramatic, emotional and erratic cluster of the DSM-III ( histrionic , narcissistic, antisocial and borderline personality disorders) were found to have the majority of individuals who scored below the conformity level in the sample, with almost half of the individuals in this personality cluster below the conformity level. Another finding was that the psychiatric patient sample was devoid of individuals at the highest levels of ego functioning. Also, individuals who had their personality diagnoses deferred, predominantly due to psychotic mental disorders, typically were at or above the conformity level.