Psychiatry Terminology

In this lesson we’re going to take a look at the medical terms associated with Psychiatry and mental health.

The first thing I want to tell you is that you need to go check out both of the mental health and pharmacology lessons for the meds that we’re going to discuss a little bit later. It’s an excellent resource for you to learn a little bit more about these disorders. But when you’re talking about medical terms, all of the terminology centers around either the disorder itself, or very common symptoms. So starting with anxiety, this is a fear or Panic that a patient may exhibit. The term that we use for fear is a phobia, and that is your combining form. What typically will happen when your describing the type of fear is that you attach some sort of root or combining form to phobia. So for example fear of being outside is agoraphobia, fear of heights is acrophobia, and fear of closed spaces is claustrophobia.

Some other disorders that you’ll commonly see are depression, and these deal more with feelings, or phorias. So if a patient has a dysphoria,  it’s a condition where a patient has abnormal feelings. This is not uncommon with depression. They may also experience dysthymia, which uses the term thymo, which refers to mind. Now another mood disorder that you’ll probably encounter is bipolar disorders. Bipolar means two extremes, And what the medical terms do is that they’re descriptive. Bipolar disorders isn’t two opposites, but they are two extremes. Many patients to have bipolar disorders will have a feeling of mania which has demonstrated a lot of different ways, and they will experience episodes of depression. Now there’s another mild  form of bipolar disorder called cyclothymia, or cyclothymic. Cyclo means cycle, and thymo means mind. So this is really just a mild bipolar disorder where the depressive episodes don’t meet major depression criteria.

The last one that you may see is schizophrenia. Schizophrenia literally means split mind. And many of these patients don’t have the capacity to understand that the inner thoughts that they’re having are part of the normal process. So our normal thoughts that we perceive to be as us just thinking through processes tend to be thought of as voices by a schizophrenic patient. There’s  an excellent lesson on this so I encourage you to go check that out.

Now when dealing with different types of pharmacology for the psychiatric patient it’s really going to be focused on treating the symptoms. Antidepressants are the medications used to fight depression. There are typically three major classes of antidepressants, but there are more. This is not an exhaustive list. Ssris, or selective serotonin reuptake Inhibitors focus on improving the amount of serotonin in the brain to make a patient feel better. Monoamine oxidase inhibitors  suppress an enzyme called monoamine oxidase that normally degrades neurotransmitters. It’s not as common because there are a few side effects, but it is sometimes used as an antidepressant. The last class would be tricyclic antidepressants.

Antipsychotics focus on modifying psychotic symptoms and behaviors, whereas anti-anxiety or antipanic agents focus on lessening the tension, anxiety, or fears are panics that patients may have. One thing that I want to mention here is that anti-anxiety medications are sometimes called anxiolytics, meaning to break up or destroy anxiety. They can be used interchangeably, so I just want you to be aware of them.

Just like we do with the majority of our lessons, we’re going to add some of the common terms associated with Psychiatry so that you are familiar with them. When you’re seeing some of these words, you can be able to identify them as specific to Psychiatry. Hallucino refers to the term hallucinate, whereas Philo means attraction. Now you’re going to see Philo with many different types of sexual disorders such as paraphilias or sexual dysfunctions. Anytime we’re dealing with some sort of obsessive preoccupation, you’ll use the suffix Mania. An example of this would be kleptomania, where someone has an obsessive preoccupation in stealing things.

So let’s recap. In Psychiatry, the disorders that are focused on are typically anxiety, mood, and schizophrenia. Again this is not an exhaustive list, but we were talking about medical terms,  These are the focus. The goal of pharmacology is to treat the symptoms, and the classes of the drugs are going to describe what they are treating. A lot of these psychiatric terms focus on the disorders or the symptoms, and some of these terms aren’t easy so it’s really important that you practice the ones that you’re unfamiliar with.

So that’s our lesson on psychiatric medical terminology. Make sure you check out all the resources attached to this lesson. Now, go out and be your best self today, and is always happy nursing.