What Exactly is Psychotic Depression?
Where do the Hallucinations Come From?
Knowing the difference between psychotic depression
and other forms of depression is an important step to recovery.
Psychotic depression is depression accompanied by hallucination and delusions. Hallucinations is seeing and hearings things, while delusions refers to irrational fears and thoughts.
The major difference between sufferers of psychotic depression and other depressive illnesses where hallucination is present, is that the psychotic depressive know his or her thoughts are not true.
Signs of psychotic depression are:
- Insomnia (inability to fall asleep)
- Anxiety
- Inability to move
- Hallucinations and delusions
Although the cause of psychotic depression is not known, scientists have found a link to a hormone, Cortical. This hormone is produced in large quantities during periods of stress.
Unlike some depressive disease there are no risk factors isolated for occurrence of psychotic depression. Nonetheless, those with a family member or members who have depression are more likely to be afflicted.
Treatment for psychotic depression
Antidepressants alone do not adequately treat this form of depression.
A combination of antipsychotic drugs and antidepressants tend to work well to control symptoms.
ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) is also used to treat extreme cases. Although results are normally good, electroconvulsive therapy is never used lightly. This treatment has to be administered by a trained professional, generally a psychiatrist.
Hospital stay is almost always necessary when one is having a psychotic episode.
Recovery from psychotic depression
Recovery from psychotic depression normally takes up to a year, but the outcome is normally positive. Psychotic symptoms may never return after treatment, but symptoms of depression may.
It is therefore important the patient adhere to his or her doctor's orders. Continuous medical follow-ups are sometimes necessary to ensure that psychosis does not reoccur.