What are thought disorders? Violation of thinking: causes, symptoms, classification

2024 Author: Miguel Ramacey | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 06:11

Each person lives according to an individual scenario of reflecting reality. One can see the desert, the other an island of flowers in the sand, for some the sun shines, while for others it seems not bright enough. The fact that each person sees the same situation differently depends on an important mental process - thinking. We analyze, evaluate, compare, perform mathematical operations thanks to him.

Many specialists are studying the peculiarities of thinking, most often they are psychologists and psychiatrists. In the field of psychology, there are many different tests that have validity and reliability. Diagnostics of thinking is carried out to determine violations, as well as to search for methods for the development of thinking. On the basis of psychiatric knowledge, pathological processes of thinking can be determined. After that, medical assistance is organized for people who have a pathological work of this mental process. What kind of thinking disorders can be observed?

What is the norm of a mental process that reflects the reality?

To this day, many experts argue how to correctly definecomplex mental process - thinking. But so far there has not been a complete and meaningful thesis that would illuminate all the work that it does in our minds. This mental process is part of the intellect along with others (memory, imagination, attention and perception). Thinking transforms all the information received from the outside, transferring it into the plane of subjective perception of the human environment. A person can express a subjective model of reality with the help of language, speech, and this distinguishes him from other living beings. It is thanks to speech that a person is called the highest rational individual.

Perceiving various situations, with the help of speech, a person expresses his conclusions, shows the logic of his judgments. Normal thought processes must meet several criteria.

• A person must adequately perceive and process all the information that comes to him from the outside.
• Evaluation of a person should be within the framework of empirical grounds accepted in society.
• There is a formal logic that more reflects the norms and laws of the whole society. Conclusions about any situation should be based on this logic.
• Thinking processes must proceed in accordance with the laws of system regulation.
• Thinking should not be primitive, it is complexly organized, therefore it normally reflects most of the concepts of the generally accepted structure of the world.

These criteria do not fit all people under the general rules of existence. Nobody canceled the individuality of a person. It is about the majorityabout the norm. An elementary example: many people think that eating after 21.00 is harmful, so everyone who has dinner later is not included in the normal framework. But in general, this is not considered a deviation. So it is with thinking. There may be some incompatibilities with the generally accepted structure of the world by formal logic, unless these are gross violations of thinking.

Diagnostic Methods

In order to determine the consistency, flexibility, depth, critical thinking, how developed its types, there are many ways to study this mental process. Physicians practice more examination at the organic level, the diagnosis of thought disorders is carried out using conventional medical equipment. They look through the machines, look for pathological foci, conduct an MRI, an encephalogram, and so on. Psychologists use test materials in their work. Diagnostics of thinking in psychology can also be carried out with the help of planned observation and natural or laboratory experiment. The most common tests for determining the features of mental activity: the "Exclusion of concepts" technique, the Bennett test, the study of rigidity of thinking, and so on. To determine the violation of thinking in children, you can use "Divide into groups", "Circle the contour", "Find the difference", "Labyrinth" and others.

Causes of violations

The causes of violations of a complex mental process that reflects reality in ourconsciousness, there may be many. Even now, experts have not come to a consensus about some pathological disorders in human thinking. They arise due to organic damage, psychoses, neuroses, depressions. Consider the reasons for the main deviations.

1. Cognitive disorders. They make the quality of mental operations low. These disorders can occur at different levels of the organization of the human body. At the cellular level, they prevent the patient from adequately perceiving the surrounding reality, followed by incorrect decisions about what is happening. These are pathologies such as Alzheimer's disease (dementia due to organic lesions of the cerebral vessels), schizophrenia. When the temporal lobes of the brain are damaged, memory and thinking are impaired, which does not allow a person to perform their usual activities, organize and classify objects. With poor eyesight, a person receives distorted information, so his judgments and conclusions may not correspond to life realities.
2. Pathologies of forms of thinking originate from psychoses. At the same time, a person is not able to organize information on the basis of the generally accepted logic of things, therefore, he makes unrealistic conclusions. Here there is a fragmentation of thoughts, the absence of any connections between them, as well as the perception of information according to external criteria, there is no associative connection between situations or objects.
3. Disorders of thought content. Due to the weakness of the perception system (in particular, the transformation of external stimuli), there is a "skew" of the accent withreal events to events that the subject has determined to be of great value to him.
4. Lack of systemic regulation. A person's thinking is arranged in such a way that in a problem situation he looks for ways out based on previous experience and information processing in a given period of time. Normally, systemic regulation helps a person to abstract from the surrounding discomfort, look at the problem from the outside, ask himself questions and look for constructive answers at the same time, and create a common plan of action. With a lack of this regulation, a person cannot quickly and effectively find a way out of this situation. Such thinking disorders can be due to emotional overload, trauma, brain tumors, toxic lesions, inflammation in the forehead.

Types of pathological thinking

There are quite a lot of pathologies of mental activity, since this process is multifaceted. There is a classification of disorders that combines all the properties and varieties of the mental process that reflects reality. Types of thinking disorders are as follows:

1. Pathology of the dynamics of thinking.
2. Violations of the motivational part of the thought process.
3. Operational violations.

Pathologies of the operational side of the mental process

These violations affect the process of generalization of concepts. Because of this, the logical connections between them in human judgments suffer, direct judgments, ideas about objects and various situations come to the fore. Patients cannot choose from the many features and properties of the object the most suitable for its most accurate characterization. Most often, such pathological processes are people with oligophrenia, epilepsy, encephalitis.

Violations of this type can also be characterized by a distortion of the generalization process. In this case, the sick person does not take into account the properties of the object, which are essentially interconnected. Only random characteristics are chosen, there is no connection between objects and phenomena based on a generally accepted cultural level. There is such a violation of thinking in schizophrenia and psychopathy.

Impairments affecting the dynamics of thought

Diversity of the pace of mental activity, consistency and spontaneity characterize the dynamics of the process, subjectively reflecting reality. There are several signs that indicate a violation of the dynamic side of thinking.

• Slippage. With normal and consistent reasoning about something, without losing the generalization, patients begin to talk about completely different things. They may slip to another topic without completing the previous one, thinking in inadequate associations or rhymes. At the same time, perceiving such reservations as the norm. Because of this process, the normal and logical train of thought is disrupted.
• Responsiveness. The process by which the patient responds to all external stimuli. At first, he can reason critically and adequately, but then perceive all absolutely irritants as addressed to him, count improvised objects.animate, who definitely need help or his participation. Such people may become disoriented in space and time.
• Inconsistency. A sick person is distinguished by inconsistent judgments. At the same time, all the basic properties of thinking are preserved. A person can inconsistently express logical judgments, analyze and generalize. Such a pathology is very common in people with vascular diseases, brain injuries, TIR, and there is also a violation of thinking in schizophrenia, but they account for about 14% of the total number of diseases.
• Inertia. With the preserved functions and properties of the thought process, the pace of actions and judgments is noticeably slowed down. It is extremely difficult for a person to switch to another action, goal, to act out of habit. Often inertia occurs in people with epilepsy, MDS, epileptoid psychopathy, and can also accompany depressive, apathetic, asthenic conditions.
• Acceleration. Ideas that arise too quickly, judgments that even affect the voice (it can become hoarse due to the constant flow of speech). With such a pathology, increased emotionality occurs: when a person says something, he gesticulates too much, gets distracted, picks up and expresses low-quality ideas and associative connections.

What does personality disorder mean?

For people with deviations in the personal component of thinking, the following violations of thinking are typical.

• Diversity. Any value,judgment, conclusion can be "located" in different planes of thinking. With a safe analysis, generalization and comparison in a person, any task can proceed in directions that are in no way connected with each other. For example, knowing that she needs to take care of nutrition, a woman can buy the most delicious dishes for a cat, and not for her children. That is, the task and knowledge are adequate, the attitude towards the set goal and the fulfillment of the task are pathological.
• Reasoning. The thinking of a person with such a pathology is aimed at "solving global problems." In another way, this violation is called fruitless reasoning. That is, a person can spend his eloquence, instruct, express himself intricately for no particular reason.
• Ornate. When a person explains something, he spends a lot of words and emotions for this. Thus, his speech contains unnecessary reasoning that makes communication difficult.
• Amorphous. In other words, it is a violation of logical thinking. At the same time, a person is confused in concepts and logical connections between them. Outsiders cannot understand what he is talking about. This also includes fragmentation, in which there is no connection between individual phrases.

Thinking content - what is it?

The content of thinking is its essence, that is, the work of the main properties: comparison, synthesis, analysis, generalization, specification, concept, judgment, conclusion. In addition, the concept of content includes ways of knowing the world - induction and deduction. To the internal structure of this mental process, experts add more types: abstract,visual-effective and figurative thinking.

A separate class of disorders in which a person's thinking goes through the path of degradation are the pathologies of its content. At the same time, its properties are preserved in some way, but inadequate judgments, logical connections and aspirations come to the fore in the mind. The pathologies of this class include disorders of thinking and imagination.

Obsessions in humans

These violations are otherwise known as obsessions. Such thoughts arise involuntarily, constantly occupy the attention of a person. They may contradict his system of values, not correspond to his life. Because of them, a person is exhausted emotionally, but cannot do anything with them. Obsessive thoughts, ideas are perceived by a person as his own, but due to the fact that they are mostly aggressive, obscene, meaningless, a person suffers from their attack. They can arise due to traumatic situations or organic damage to the prefrontal cortex, basal ganglion, cingulate gyrus.

Overvalued emotional ideas

These would seem to be harmless judgments, but they were singled out as a separate pathological process - a violation of thinking. Psychology and psychiatry deal with this problem side by side, since overvalued ideas can be corrected by psychological methods in the early stages. A person with such a pathology has preserved properties of thinking, but at the same time one or a set of ideas that encourage action,does not give him rest. It occupies a dominant place among all thoughts in his mind, exhausting a person emotionally and stuck in the brain for a long time.

Delirium as a thought process disorder

It is a gross violation of the thought process, as a person has conclusions and ideas that do not correspond to his values, reality, generally accepted laws of logic. The patient thinks they are right and cannot be convinced otherwise.