ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of major psychiatric disorders, including presenting symptoms, pathophysiology, and treatment options. Schizophrenia spectrum disorders are defined by abnormalities in at least one of the five domains: delusions, hallucinations, disorganized thinking, grossly disorganized or abnormal motor behavior, and negative symptoms. Cognitive impairments in schizophrenic patients include deficits in memory, abstraction, and attention. Unlike many of the other major psychiatric disorders, schizophrenia generally presents with "global" cognitive impairments that include difficulty with everything from attention, to memory, to fluency, executive function, and verbal ability. Anxiety disorders are mental disorders that are characterized by anxiety and fear. Anxiety disorders can be broken up into about six different major sub-categories; namely, panic disorders (PD), generalized anxiety disorders (GAD), social anxiety disorder (SAD), PTSD, OCD, and specific phobias. Each anxiety disorder presents with its own unique list of cognitive impairments, but overall, the anxiety disorders present with impairments in executive function and verbal episodic memory.
