Affective disorders: symptoms and manifestations of ailment

Affective disorders are characterized by extreme changes in mood towards upsurge or depression. Most often, such fluctuations are accompanied by violations of the level of general activity, and other symptoms of the disease are secondary or appear in the context of a disorder of activity and mood.

Affective disorders are classified as endogenous diseases, which are caused by hereditary factors. Most of the abnormalities are repeated periodically. Sometimes individual episodes of the disease are provoked by stressful situations and events, but more often the disorders occur for no apparent reason, spontaneously. Relapse of the disease is influenced by social factors, conflicts at work, unfavorable situation in the family, overburdened psychological burden associated with life, material difficulties.

The average age at which the onset of disease is observed is about 30 years and can fluctuate widely. In some cases, psychogenic disorders develop in early youth.

Affective disorders include various types of depression.

In the classical case, depression includes the depressed motor, mental affective state of a person. The patient looks depressed, slow-moving, with a sad look and a stiff expression of sadness. Speech with such a disorder is slow and quiet, perception and thinking are difficult, memory is low. In the mood, the predominant feelings are depression, heaviness in the chest, feelings of restraint. The world around us becomes obsolete for the person, interests are lost, the future is seen as unpromising. The personal self-esteem is reduced, self-blame and self-blame arise.

However, more often depressive affective disorders include other symptoms. Fear, anxiety, a feeling of apathy take possession of a sick person. In severe cases, there is a delusion of relations, sinfulness, nihilistic ideas. The patient can claim that he is already dead, that there is no surrounding world.

Depending on the characteristic of the affective disorder, one can speak of simple, apathic, anxious depression or illness with anxious-phobic, senesto-hypochondriac, despisno-nalizatsionnuyu and other disorders.
Sometimes affective mood disorders are not too obvious, and in the foreground there are physical symptoms. Patients have complaints of pain in the abdominal cavity, heart area, dizziness. In such cases, you can talk about masked depression. Such patients may for years unsuccessfully be treated by a general practitioner without adequate help and without recognizing their own mental disorders. These conditions in somatic practice qualify as neurocirculatory and vegetative-vascular dystonia, spastic colitis, diskenzia biliary tract, etc. Against the background of the subdepressive state, there are acute attacks of fear (insultophobia, cardio phobia, fear of going insane, suffocation, death).

Affective disorders include various types of mania, states of high spirits, accompanied by ideas of self-worth, hyperactivity. At patients speech acceleration, verbosity is observed. They become mobile, talkative, easily get in touch, gesticulate a lot. Appetite is increased, but sleep is shortened. With such disorders, sexual desires increase, and patients can begin to enter into numerous promiscuity. In some severe cases, affective psychosis occurs, delusions of grandeur, psychomotor agitation, hallucinations and attacks of aggression can occur. Disinhibition and reduction of self-criticism of behavior can provoke the commission of antisocial behavior.