ABSTRACT
Psychosis is the most serious type of mental disease: madness, in lay terms. Characteristic of psychosis is more or less intermittent loss of contact with reality, which is replaced by the thoughts and imaginings of the patient's own disturbed mind. The psychoses comprise those in which the brain is structurally intact but its working impaired – the functional type, and those in which there is a physical fault or lesion -the organic type. Schizophrenia is the most important of the functional psychoses both in the devastation it causes to the individual and his family and its economic consequences. Disorders of mood, including psychoses, are at least twice as frequent in females as males. Delusions, hallucinations and thought interference may occur. There are two types: schizodepressive and schizomanic, the former responding to antidepressants and lithium, the latter to neuroleptics. There are two main categories for organic psychoses: acute and chronic.
