psychiatric termanology

www.drjayeshpatidar.blogspot.com


Ablutomania :- Excessive interest in bathing and cleaning oneself. It is common in obsessive compulsive disorder.

Aboiement :- Involuntary production of abnormal sounds.

Abreaction :- A process used in some forms of psychotherapy especially psychoanalytically oriented ones.

Abstinence Syndrome (Withdrawal syndrome) :-In the area of alcohol or drug dependence, being without the substance on which the subject is dependent.

Abstraction :- The process whereby thoughts or ideas are generalized and dissociated from particular concrete instances or material objects.


Abulia :- Lack of will or motivation, often expressed as inability to make decisions.

Abuse :- of substances, using them inappropriately in a way that is harmful to the individuals.

Acatalepsia :- A mental deficiency characterized by the inability to reason or comprehend.

Addiction :- A state of physiological or psychological dependence on some substance, usually a drug.

Affect :- The subjective and immediate experience of emotion attached to ideas of mental representation of objects.

Aggression :- forceful physical, verbal or symbolic action.

Agitation :- Excessive motor activity, usually no purposeful and associated with internal tension.


Agoraphobia :- Fear of open places: as phobic disorder characterized by a fear of leaving one’s home.

Agroinania :- Excessive interest in living alone or in rural seclusion; it is sometimes associated with schizophrenia.

Akathisia ;- A state of motor (or less often verbal) restlessness manifested by the compelling need to be in constant movement.

Akinesia :- Lack of physical movement, as in the extreme immobility of catatonic schizophrenia.

Alcoholism :- Excessive dependence on or addiction to alcohol usually to the point that the person’s physical and mental health is threatened or harmed.

Ambivalence :- Presence of strong and often overwhelming simultaneous contrasting attitudes, ideas, feelings and drives towards an object, person or goal.


Amnesia :- Pathologic loss of memory; phenomenon in which an area of experience becomes inaccessible to conscious recall.

Ataxia :- lack of coordination, either physical or mental. In neurology it refers to loss of muscular coordination.

Anxiety :- It is a pervasive feeling of dread , apprehension & impending disaster.

Aphasis:- A disturbance of language function due to organic brain disorder.

Apraxia :- Inability to perform a voluntary purposeful motor activity.

Attention :- Concentration, the aspect of consciousness.

Attitude :- A ‘mental set’ held by an individual which affects the ways that person responds to event & organizes his cognitions.


Autism :- Thought & fantasy determined entirely by the person’s needs & wishes & Not constrained by reality in any way.

Automatic obedience :- The phenomenon of undue compliance with instruction, a feature of command automatism associated with catatonic syndrome & hypnotic state.

Automatism :- Automatic & apparently undirected nonpurposive behaviour that is not consciously controlled. Seen in the psychomotor epilepsy.

Behaviour therapy :- A psychiatric treatment modality that focuses on overt & objectively observable behaviour & uses various conditioning techniques devired from learning theory to modify patient behaviour directly.

Cacosomnia :- Sleeplessness.


Cataplepsy :- Condition in which a person maintains the body position which he is placed.

Cataplexy:- Temporary sudden loss of muscle tone, causing weakness and immobilization.

Catatonic waxy flexibility:- The person’s limbs can be ‘molded’ into any position which is then maintained.

Circumstantiality :- Disturbance in the associative thought and speech processes in which the patient digresses into unnecessary details and inappropriate thoughts before communicating the central idea.

Clang association:- Association or speech directed by the sound of a word, rather then its meaning.

Community psychiatry:- psychiatry focusing on the detection, prevention and early treatment of mental disorders.


Compulsion:- Uncontrollable, repetitive and unwanted urge to perform the act.

Confabulation:- Unconscious filling the gaps in memory by imaging experiences or events that have no basis in fact.

Confusion:- A term usually employed to designate a state of impaired consciousness associated with acute or chronic cerebral organic disease.

Convulsive therapy:- A from of therapy involving a group of techniques that induces seizures.

Crisis:- A state of psychological disequilibrium, turning point in person’s life.

Crisis intervention:- A brief therapeutic approach used in emergency rooms of general psychiatric hospital that is ameliorative, rather than curative, of acute psychiatric emergency.


Deja entendu :- Illusion that what one is hearing one has heard previously.

Déjà vu :- Illusion of visual recognition in which a new situation incorrectly regarded as a repetition of a previous experience.

Delirium :- An acute, reversible organic mental disorder characterized by confusion & some impairment of consciousness.

Delusion :- A false belief that is firmly held, despite objective & obvious contradictory proof of evidence & despite the fact that other member of the culture do not share the belief.

Dementia :- A organic mental disorder characterized by general impairment in intellectual functioning.


Depersonalization :- Sensation of unreality concerning oneself, parts of oneself, or one’s environment which occurs under extreme stress or fatigue.

Depression :- A mental state characterized by feeling of sadness, loneliness, despair, low self-esteem & self-approach.

Detoxification :- Treatment by the use of medication, diet, rest, fluid & nursing care to restore physiological functioning after it has been seriously disturbed by the overuse of alcohol.

Doctor-patient relationship :- Human interchange that exist between the person who is sick & the person who is selected because of training & experience to heal.

Drug abuse :- the self-administration of a medicinal or pleasurable substance in a quantity or manner that impairs health or social function.


Drug dependence :- A state, psychic & sometime also physical, resulting from taking a drug.

Dystonia :- Extrapyramidal motor disturbance consisting of slow, sustained contraction of axial or appendicularmusculature.

Echolalia :- Repetition of another person’s words or phrase.

Echopraxia:- Repetition of another person’s movement. It is observed in some cases of schizophrenia.

Eestasy:- State of rapturous belight.

Elation:- An affective state of joyous gaiety which, when intensified and out of keeping with life circumstances, is a dominant symptom of mania and hypomania.

Emotion:- The experience of subjective feelings which have positive or negative value for the individual.


Empathy:- The intellectual and emotional awareness and understanding of another person’s state of mind.

Exhibitionism:- A paraphilia in which a man exposes his genitals to females in a socially inappropriate fashion.

Fellatio:- Use of the mouth or tongue to stimulate the male genitalia.

Flight of ideas :- A nearly continuous flow of accelerated speech with abrupt changes from topic to topic, usually based on understandable associations, distracting stimuli.

Floccillation :- Aimless plucking or picking, usually at bedclothes or clothing.

Forensic psychiatry :- The branch of psychiatry that is concerned with the legal aspects of mental illness.


General adaptational syndrome (GAS) :- The responses of the body to major stress, passing through the alarm reaction, resistance and, finally, exhaustion.

Habituation:- A very basic from of learning which involves gradually ceasing to respond to a non-significant stimulus which is repeatedly experienced.

Halfway house :- A specialized residence for patients who do not require full hospitalization but who need an intermediate degree of care before returning to independent community living.

Halo’s effect:- The improvement in anxiety may sometime spuriously improve depression is known as Halo’s effect.

Hypersomnia:- Execessive time spent asleep. It is not related to narcolepsy.


Hypnosis:- Artificially induced alteration of consciousness characterized by increased suggestibility and receptivity to direction.

Hypomania:- A psychopathologic state and abnormality of mood falling somewhere between normal euphoria and mania.

Illusion:- Perceptual misinterpretation of a real external stimulus.

Incoherence :- Speech that, for the most part, is not understandable.

Insomnia :- Difficulty in falling asleep or difficulty in staying asleep.

Introvert :- An individual inclined towards a solitary, reflective lifestyle.

Isolation :- In psychoanalysis, a defense mechanism involving the separation of an idea or memory from its attached feeling tone.


Judgement :- Mental act of comparing or evaluating choices within the framework of a given set of values for the purpose of electing a course of action.

Kleptomania :- An outmoded term for a morbid, often sudden and usually irresistible impulse to steal without an apparent need.

Loosening of associations :- A characteristic schizophrenic thinking or speech disturbance involving a disorder in the logical progression of thoughts.

Mania :- Mood disorder characterized by elation, agitation, hyperactivity and hyperexcitability, and accelerated thinking and speaking (flight of ideas).

Masochism:- A paraphilia in which sexual gratification is derived from being physically or psychologically maltreated by the partner or oneself.


Mental retardation :- A condition of arrested or incomplete development of the mind which is especially characterized by subnormality of intelligence.

Mental status :- General functional condition of mental and behavioural process as determined by psychiatric assessment of a variety of areas of functioning, such as state of consciousness, mood and affect, thinking and speech, motor behaviour, general knowledge, memory, calculation, judgement, abstraction, and insight.

Mood :- A pervasive and sustained emotion that in extreme, markedly colours the person’s perception of the world.

Mourning :- Reaction to a loss of a love object (important person, object, role status, or anything considered part of one’s life) consisting of a process of emotional detachment from that object which frees the subject to find other interests and enjoyments.


Narcolepsy :- Uncontrollable, recurrent, brief episodes of sleepassociated with excessive daytime sleepiness, cataplexy, sleep paralysis, hypnagogichallucinations, and often disturbed nocturnal sleep.

Negativism :- Verbal or nonverbal opposition or resistance to outside suggestions & advice.

Neologism :- New word or phrase, often seen in schizophrenia.

Neurosis :- Mental disorder characterized primarily by anxiety.

Nightmare :- Anxiety attack while dreaming. It characterized by mild anxiety, good recall of dream, & mild autonomic reaction.

Night-terror :- Extreme panic attack while dreaming . It is characterized by verbalization, confusion, autonomic activity & poor recall of dream.


Obsession :- Persistent & recurrent idea, thought or impulse that can not be eliminated from consciousness bylogic or reasoning.

Occupational psychiatry :- Area of psychiatric concerned with mental illness in industry.

Oedipus complex:- Constellation of feeling, impulses, & conflict in the developing child that concern sexual impuses& attraction toward the opposite-sex parent & aggressive, hostile, or envious feeling toward the same-sex parent.

Organic mental disorder :- mental disorder caused by transient or permanent brain dysfunction attributable to specific organic factor.

Paranoia:- A rare condition characterized by the gradual development of an intricate, complex & elaborate system of thinking based on misinterpretation of an actual event.


paraphillia :- Types of psychosexual disorder. The term refer to a sexual deviation characterized by persitent & recurrent sexual fantasies, often of an unusual nature, without which imagery erotic arousal or orgasm in not attained.

Parapraxis :- A faulty act, blunder, or lapse of memory such as a slip of the tongue or misplacement of an article.

Pederasty:- Homosexual & intercourse between men & boys with the latter as the passive partner.

Pedophilia :- A paraphilia involving sexual activity of adult with the children as the object.

Perseveration :- Persistent repetition of words, idea, or subjects so that , once an individual begins speaking about a particular subject or uses aparticular word, it continually recurs.


Perversion :- Deviation from the expected norm. In psychiatric, it commonly signifies sexual perversion.

Phobia :- An obsessive, persistent, unrealistic, intense fear of an object or situation.

Phobic disorder :- An anxiety disorder characterized by intense specific fear of an object.

Pica :- An eating disorder consisting of the craving & eating of unusual foods or other substances.

Schizophrenia :- Psychotic mental disorder characterized by disturbances in thinking, mood & behaviour.

Transsexualism:- A gender identity disorder in which a person has a desire to be of the opposite sex.

Uxoricide :- Killing of a wife by her husband.

Verbigeration :- Senseless repetition of same words or phrases over & over again.


Waxy flexibility :- Parts of body can be placed in positions that will be maintained for long periods of time, even if very uncomfortable .

withdrawal symptoms :- It is an organic mental disorder following stopping or reduction in theintakeof a substance such as alcohol, opioids etc.

Zoolagnia :-Sexual attraction to animals.

psychiatric termanology

Health & Medicine