Glossary
AbreactionAn emotional release or discharge after recalling a painful experience.
Acting Out
The process of expressing unconscious emotional conflicts or feelings via actions rather than words. The person is not consciously aware of the meaning of such acts. Acting out may be harmful or, in controlled situations, therapeutic (for instance children's play therapy).
ADD
Attention Deficit Disorder
Addiction
A term referring to compulsive drug use, psychological dependence, and continuing use despite harm. Addiction is frequently and incorrectly equated with physical dependence and withdrawal.
ADHD - Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder
A disorder characterized by lack of impulse control, inability to concentrate and hyperactivity. Also called attention deficit disorder (ADD).
Adjustment Disorder
Adjustment disorder is a state of mixed of emotions such as depression and anxiety which occurs as a reaction to major life events or when having to face major life changes such as illness or relationship breakdown.
Affective disorders
A mental disorder which refers to disorders of mood. Examples would include Major Depressive Disorder, Dysthymia, Depressive Disorder, Bipolar Disorder...
Agitation
Excessive motor activity that accompanies and is associated with a feeling of inner tension. For example: fidgeting, wringing of the hands, pulling of clothes, pacing up and down, and an inability to sit still.
Agoraphobia
Anxiety - apprehension, tension, or uneasiness from anticipation of danger, the source of which is largely unknown or unrecognized. May be regarded as pathological when it interferes with effectiveness in living, achievement of desired goals or satisfaction, or reasonable emotional comfort.
Alzheimer's disease
A common cause of dementia. Alzheimer's Disease is a progressive disease affecting the brain. It causes problems with memory, thinking and behaviour.
Ambivalence
The coexistence of contradictory emotions, attitudes, ideas, or desires with respect to a particular person, object, or situation. Often, the person is not fully aware of the conflict.
Amnesia
Loss of memory.
Anger Management
The term usually refers to a technique or exercise that can control or reduce feelings of anger in an individual. A common technique is to use deep breathing, meditation, and/or relaxation.
Anhedonia
loss of the capacity to experience pleasure.
Anorexia Nervosa
Anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder characterized by excess control - morbid fear of obesity leads the sufferer to try and limit or reduce their weight by excessive dieting, exercising, vomiting, purging and use of diuretics. Sufferers are typically more than 15% below the average weight for their height/sex/age.
Anxiety
The apprehensive anticipation of future danger or misfortune accompanied by a feeling of discomfort or feelings of tension. Can be distinguished from fear as fear generally arises in response to a known, or at least, more tangible threat.
Anxiety Disorder
A term covering several different forms of fear, phobia and nervous condition, that come on suddenly and prevent pursuing normal daily routines including general anxiety disorder, social anxiety, sometimes known as social phobia or social anxiety disorder (SAD), obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), agoraphobia, claustrophobia, panic disorder, separation anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Apathy
A lack of feeling, emotion, interest, or concern.
Attention
The ability to focus in a sustained manner on a particular stimulus or activity. A disturbance in attention may be manifested by easy distractibility or difficulty in finishing tasks or in concentrating on work.
Auditory Hallucination
A perception of sound in the absence of an actual sound.
Bipolar Disorder
A mental illness that causes people to have severe high and low moods. People with this illness swing from feeling overly happy and joyful (or irritable) to feeling very sad and hopeless (or happy). In between these mood swings, a person's moods may be normal.
Body Image
One's sense of the self and one's body.
Bruxism
Refers to the grinding of the teeth. It occurs unconsciously while awake or during sleep and may be indicative of anxiety, tension, or dental problems.
Bulimia Nervosa
An eating disorder in which people eat large amounts of food in a sitting (binging), and then vomit (purging). The vomiting is triggered by a fear of weight gain, from stomach pain, or from the guilt of overeating. People with bulimia also use laxatives, diuretics, and vigorous exercise to lose weight.
CBT - Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
Cognitive therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy is a kind of psychotherapy used to treat depression, anxiety disorders, phobias, and other forms of psychological disorder. It involves recognizing distorted thinking and learning to replace it with more realistic substitute ideas. Its practitioners hold that the cause of many (though not all) depressions are irrational thoughts. Cognitive therapy is often used in conjunction with mood stabilizing medications to treat bipolar disorder.
Comorbidity
The simultaneous appearance of two or more illnesses. This may be indicative of a vulnerability to both disorders or of a relationship between the two disorders.
Compulsion
Repetitive ritualistic behaviour such as hand washing or ordering or a mental act such as praying or repeating words silently that aims to prevent or reduce distress or prevent some dreaded event or situation. The person feels driven to perform such actions in response to an obsession or according to rules that must be applied rigidly, even though the behaviours are recognized to be excessive or unreasonable.
Contraindications
Any factor of a patient's condition that makes it unwise to take a specific medication.
Coping Mechanisms
Ways of altering one's approach to situations or events to deal with stress. These can be conscious or unconscious.
Delirium
An acute organic brain syndrome secondary to physical causes in which consciousness is affected and disorientation results often associated with illusions, visual hallucinations and persecutory ideation.
Delusion
a fixed, unshakeable, belief which is out of keeping with a person's cultural context, intelligence and social background and which is held with unshakeable conviction.
Dementia
Dementia is a syndrome (a term used to describe a group of related symptoms) that are associated with an ongoing decline of the brain and its abilities. These include: language, memory, thinking, and understanding.
Depression
Depression refers to feelings of sadness, despair and discouragement. It can be characterized by slowed thinking, decreased pleasure, decreased purposeful physical activity, guilt and hopelessness, and changes in eating and sleeping. It becomes a problem when it persists for two weeks or longer.
Depressive Disorder
A state of depression and anhedonia so severe as to require clinical intervention.
Disorder
An abnormal state of body or mind. A condition or group of characteristics which impairs functioning or causes distress.
Distractibility
The inability to maintain attention, that is, the shifting from one area or topic to another with minimal provocation, or attention being drawn too frequently to unimportant or irrelevant external stimuli.
Elevated mood
An exaggerated feeling of well being, or euphoria or elation. A person with elevated mood may describe feeling "high," "ecstatic," "on top of the world," or "up in the clouds."
Extraversion
A state in which attention and energies are largely directed outward from the self as opposed to inward toward the self, as in introversion.
Fantasy
An imagined sequence of events or mental images (e.g., daydreams) that serves to express unconscious conflicts, to gratify unconscious wishes, or to prepare for anticipated future events.
Flashback
A recurrence of a memory, feeling, or perceptual experience from the past.
Flight of Ideas
A nearly continuous flow of accelerated speech with abrupt changes from topic to topic that are usually based on understandable associations, distracting stimuli, or plays on words. When severe, speech may be disorganized and incoherent.
Hallucination
An abnormal sensory experience that arises in the absence of a direct external stimulus, and which has the qualities of a normal percept and is experienced as real and usually in external space. Hallucinations may occur in any sensory modality Hallucination
Hyperactivity
behaviour characterized by over activity.
Hypersomnia
Excessive sleepiness.
Idealization
A mental mechanism in which the person attributes exaggeratedly positive qualities to the self or others
Illusion
An abnormal perception caused by a sensory misinterpretation of and actual stimulus, sometimes precipitated by strong emotion, e.g. fear provoking a person to imagine they have seen an intruder in the shadows.
Insight
In psychotic mental disorders and organic brain syndromes a patient's insight into whether or not they are ill and therefore requiring treatment may be affected. In depression a person may lack insight into their best qualities and in mania a person may overestimate their wealth and abilities.
Insomnia
Difficulty in falling asleep, remaining asleep, or a lack of quality of sleep.
Introversion
A preoccupation with oneself combined with a reduced interest in the external world.
Libido
The psychic drive or energy usually associated with the sexual instinct. (Sexual is used here in the broad sense to include pleasure and love-object seeking.)
Long-Term Memory
The final phase of memory in which information storage may last from hours to a lifetime.
Mania
A severe medical condition typified by highly elevated mood, energy, unusual thought patterns and sometimes psychosis.
Manic Depression
A mental illness that causes people to have severe high and low moods. People with this illness swing from feeling overly happy and joyful (or irritable) to feeling very sad and hopeless (or happy). In between these mood swings, a person's moods may be normal.
Mental Retardation
A major group of disorders of infancy, childhood, or adolescence characterized by intellectual functioning that is significantly below average (IQ of 70 or below), manifested before the age of 18 by impaired adaptive functioning.
Mood
A pervasive and sustained emotion that colours the perception of the world. Common examples of mood include depression, elation, anger, and anxiety.
Mood Swings
Fluctuation of a person's emotional tone between periods of elation and periods of depression.
Negativism
Opposition or resistance, either covert or overt, to outside suggestions or advice.
Obsession
Obsession is characterized by recurrent and persistent thoughts, impulses, or images that are experienced as intrusive and inappropriate and that caused marked anxiety or distress.
OCD - Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
A mental disorder that features intrusive thoughts that produce anxiety. The symptoms of this disorder range from repetitive hand-washing and hoarding through to preoccupation with sexual, religious, or aggressive impulses. These symptoms can be alienating and time-consuming, and often lead to severe emotional and economic loss.
Olfactory Hallucination
An hallucination involving the perception of odour, such as of burning rubber or decaying fish.
Panic Attacks
An overwhelming sense of fear, apprehension and anxiety. As well as these feelings, one may also experience physical symptoms, such as nausea, sweating, trembling and a sensation of a racing heart.
Parkinson's Disease
A chronic and progressive degenerative disease of the brain that impairs motor control, speech, and other functions. The disease is named after the physician James Parkinson, who first described it.
Personality Disorder
Mental disorder characterized by inflexible, deeply ingrained, maladaptive patterns of adjustment to life that cause either subjective distress or significant impairment of adaptive functioning.
Phobia
A persistent, irrational fear of a specific object, activity, or situation resulting in an overwhelming desire to avoid it.
Psychosis
A mental state in which the perception of reality is distorted. Persons experiencing a psychotic episode may experience hallucinations (often auditory or visual hallucinations), hold paranoid or delusional beliefs, experience personality changes and exhibit disorganized thinking.
PTSD - Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
An anxiety disorder that develops in some individuals after a major traumatic experience such as war, rape, domestic violence, or accident, causing the person who survived the event to have persistent, frightening thoughts and memories, or flashbacks, of the ordeal.
Sexual Dysfunction
Sexual problems, also called sexual dysfunction or sexual malfunction, are defined as difficulty during any stage of the sexual act (which includes desire, arousal, orgasm, and resolution) that prevents the individual or couple from enjoying sexual activity.
Symptom
A subjective manifestation of a pathological condition. Symptoms are reported by the affected individual rather than observed by the examiner.
Syndrome
A grouping of signs and symptoms, based on their frequent co-occurrence, that may suggest a common underlying pathogenesis, course, familial pattern, or treatment selection.
Visual Hallucination
A hallucination involving sight, which may consist of formed images, such as of people, or of unformed images, such as flashes of light. Visual hallucinations should be distinguished from illusions, which are misperceptions of real external stimuli.