Psychosis

Psychosis is a mental state in which a person loses contact with reality or has difficulty distinguishing what is imagined from what is real. People who experience it may have hallucinations, delusions and disorganized thinking, which affect their behaviour, their relationships and their daily life.

The term comes from the Greek psychosis, derived from psyche, meaning 'soul' or 'mind', and it is used in psychiatry and psychoanalysis with different meanings. In psychiatry it describes a cluster of symptoms rather than a single disease: it appears in conditions such as schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder or the most intense phases of bipolar disorder, and it can also result from neurological illness, the use of certain substances or extreme stress. For this reason clinicians distinguish primary episodes, arising from a psychiatric condition, from secondary ones, caused by another medical illness or by medication. It should not be confused with psychopathy, a personality construct that has no connection with it.

From the standpoint of psychoanalysis, psychosis is understood as a subjective structure. Jacques Lacan described it as the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father, that is, the failure to inscribe the symbolic law that introduces limit and lack. On this view, psychoanalysis does not treat it as a disease to be cured but as a particular way of being in the world, and it distinguishes forms such as paranoid, schizophrenic or autistic psychosis according to how the subject responds to the enjoyment that breaks in.

The causes are not fully established. Genetic and neurochemical factors have been studied, including the activity of dopamine and serotonin, while some psychoanalytic schools attribute its origin to structural factors external to the subject. Some researchers also argue that psychosis forms a continuum with unusual experiences that many people have without suffering from them, a point that remains debated. Treatment usually combines antipsychotic medication, psychotherapy and social support, and early intervention is often associated with better outcomes.