What We Treat

Psychosis can be defined: (Strahl, 2005)

Psychiatrically as:

• a gross impairment testing.
• a loss of contact with reality
• an inability to distinguish      what is real from what is not real.
• a loss of ego boundaries

Legally as:

• “Insane” when the person who      committed the crime could not distinguish between right and wrong at the      time the crime was committed.
• Non Compos mentis (not of      sound mind, memory or understanding)

In lay terms (at times pejoratively) as

• crazy, mad, lunatic, “psycho”,      maniac

In DSM-IV-TR by the presence of:

• delusions, any prominent      hallucinations, disorganized behavior, or catatonic behavior  

Schizophrenia, in the various terms that have been used to describe it (madness, insanity, dementia praecox, unreason), has been around, perhaps, since the beginning of mankind.

However, it was not until the late 1800s that it was first actively studied. Changes in fundamental diagnostic concepts and their impact on both clinical work and research can be traced back well into the 19th century with, for example, Maudsley’s (1867) description of childhood “insanity” and Kraepelin’s description of dementia praecox (Kraepelin, 1919).

In 1980, Psychosis and Schizophrenia gained a renewed interest with the major changes in classification introduced by the DSM-III.

In 2007, the child and adolescent first-episode psychotic study, CAFEPS(Castro-Fornieles et al, 2007), became the largest early-onset first-episode psychosis sample ever studied and the one with the shortest duration of symptoms and psychopharmacological treatment..