ABSTRACT
Definition: Psychosis is a syndrome defined by positive symptoms, phenomena that are outside of normal experience, typically delusions, hallucinations and/or thought disorder. It may be secondary to another medical disorder or may be a primary psychiatric disorder. Schizophrenia is essentially a chronic idiopathic psychosis with a broad impairment of function with additional negative symptoms. These are typically loss of normal behaviours and motivation: affective flattening, alogia, avolition, anhedonia and attentional impairment (Andreasen, Arch Gen Psychiatry 1982; 39(7):784–8).
