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Factors Involved in Delusion Formation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 August 2018

Ian Brockington
Ian Brockington*
Affiliation:
University Department of Psychiatry, Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Birmingham B15 2TH
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Extract

I write as one who has grappled with improving the classification of the psychoses, but I believe that the strategy of developing a set of descriptive concepts, and using such preliminary groupings to search for the primary causes of the ‘diseases‘ defined (genes, brain damage, social and psychological stressors, etc.) is insufficiently ambitious. Psychiatry has been too reductionist in its attitude to both the causes and the treatment of symptoms (such as delusions), placing the entire emphasis on investigating and treating the ‘underlying disease‘, not the delusional process itself. Internal medicine has often been able to unfold the whole disease process from primary causes and preconditions through disordered physiology to symptoms. In psychiatry it is also important to understand the pathogenesis of symptoms, that is, to specify the stages in the transposition of stress and cerebral pathology into the phenomena of mental illness.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 159 , Issue S14: Delusions and Awareness of Reality , November 1991 , pp. 42 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal College of Psychiatrists 

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