What is Acute Schizophrenia-like Psychotic Disorder?
As with acute transient psychoses with symptoms of schizophrenia, with these disorders, productive symptoms of the first rank are noted, but there are also negative disorders. This diagnosis is usually only intermediate, and the risk of re-psychosis and, consequently, a review of the diagnosis of schizophrenia is quite high.
Diagnosis of Acute Schizophrenia-like Psychotic Disorder
- General criteria for acute transient psychotic disorders (F23.0) are absent.
- No more than a month (up to three months), productive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia are noted, that is, delirium of exposure, delusional interpretation and delusional perception, characteristic of schizophrenia. Hallucinations, including auditory commentators, contradictory and mutually exclusive, imperative truths and pseudo-hallucinations, somatic hallucinations and a symptom of open thoughts, the sound of one’s own thoughts related to symptoms of the first rank in schizophrenia.
- No more than a month (up to three months) negative symptoms of schizophrenia are noted: reduction of energy potential, loss of social communications, estrangement and emotional coldness, ambivalence and emotional inadequacy, fencing.
Differential diagnosis
It should be differentiated from the manifest period of paranoid schizophrenia, especially in adolescence. If the disorder begins with an initial period in which negative symptoms of schizophrenia sound, then the risk of this diagnosis increases.
Treatment of Acute Schizophrenia-like Psychotic Disorder
In treatment, it is necessary to use antipsychotics in medium, and sometimes in small doses, nootropics. Supportive therapy is mandatory to prevent the next attack, prolongations are usually used (orap, semap, lioradin-depot, haloperidol-depot or moditen-depot).