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Mental Health Terms

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  • Panic attacks

  • Discrete periods of sudden onset of intense apprehension, fearfulness, or terror, often associated with feelings of impending doom. During these attacks there are symptoms such as shortness of breath or smothering sensations; palpitations, pounding heart, or accelerated heart rate; chest pain or discomfort; choking; and fear of going crazy or losing control. Panic attacks may be unexpected (uncued), in which the onset of the attack is not associated with a situational trigger and instead occurs 'out of the blue'; situationally bound, in which the panic attack almost invariably occurs immediately on exposure to, or in anticipation of, a situational trigger ('cue'); and situationally predisposed, in which the panic attack is more likely to occur on exposure to a situational trigger but is not invariably associated with it.

  • Panic Disorder

  • An anxiety disorder characterized by chronic, repeated and unexpected intense periods of fear when there is no specific cause for the fear. In between panic attacks, people with panic disorder worry excessively about when and where the next attack may occur. Panic disorder may be accompanied by agoraphobia.

  • Paranoia

  • A mental disorder, or an element of several other mental illnesses, characterized by suspicion, delusions of persecution and jealousy.

  • Paranoid Disorders

  • Symptoms of paranoid disorders include feelings of persecution and an exaggerated sense of self-importance. The disorder is present in many mental disorders and it is rare as an isolated mental illness. A person with paranoia can usually work and function in everyday life since the delusions involve only one area. However, their lives can be isolated and limited.

  • Paranoid ideation

  • Ideation, of less than delusional proportions, involving suspiciousness or the belief that one is being harassed, persecuted, or unfairly treated.

  • Paranoid Personality Disorder

  • People with this disorder are often cold, distant and unable to form close, interpersonal relationships. Often overly suspicious of their surroundings, people with paranoid personality disorder generally cannot see their role in conflict situations and often project their feelings of paranoia as anger onto others.

  • Parasomnia

  • Abnormal behavior or physiological events occurring during sleep or sleep-wake transitions.

  • Passive aggression

  • Indirectly and unassertively expressing aggression toward others, masking resentment or hostility.

  • Persecutory delusion

  • A delusion in which the central theme is that one (or someone to whom one is close) is being attacked, harassed, cheated, persecuted, or conspired against.

  • Perseveration

  • Tendency to emit the same verbal or motor response again and again to varied stimuli.

  • Personality

  • Enduring patterns of perceiving, relating to, and thinking about the environment and oneself. Personality traits are prominent aspects of personality that are exhibited in a wide range of important social and personal contexts. Only when personality traits are inflexible and maladaptive and cause either significant functional impairment or subjective distress do they constitute a Personality Disorder.

  • Phobia

  • A persistent, irrational fear of a specific object, activity, or situation (the phobic stimulus) that results in a compelling desire to avoid it. This often leads either to avoidance of the phobic stimulus or to enduring it with dread.

  • Postpartum depression

  • A type of depression that occurs after childbirth.

  • Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)

  • A debilitating condition that is related to a past terrifying physical or emotional experience causing the person who survived the event to have persistent, frightening thoughts and memories or flashbacks, of the ordeal. People with PTSD often feel chronically emotionally numb.

  • Preconscious

  • Thoughts that are not in immediate awareness but that can be recalled by conscious effort.

  • Pressured speech

  • Speech that is increased in amount, accelerated, and difficult or impossible to interrupt. Usually it is also loud and emphatic. Frequently the person talks without any social stimulation and may continue to talk even though no one is listening.

  • Prevalence

  • Frequency of a disorder, used particularly in epidemiology to denote the total number of cases existing within a unit of population at a given time or over a specified period.

  • Primary gain

  • The relief from emotional conflict and the freedom from anxiety achieved by a defense mechanism. Contrast with secondary gain.

  • Primary process

  • In psychoanalytic theory, the generally unorganized mental activity characteristic of the unconscious. This activity is marked by the free discharge of energy and excitation without regard to the demands of environment, reality, or logic.

  • Prognosis

  • The patient's chances for recovery; a medical assessment of the probable course and outcome of a disease, based on the recorded history of the disease, the physician's own experience of treating the disease, and the patient's general condition and age.

  • Projection

  • A defense mechanism, operating unconsciously, in which what is emotionally unacceptable in the self is unconsciously rejected and attributed (projected) to others.

  • Projective identification

  • A term introduced by Melanie Klein to refer to the unconscious process of projection of one or more parts of the self or of the internal object into another person (such as the mother). What is projected may be an intolerable, painful, or dangerous part of the self or object (the bad object). It may also be a valued aspect of the self or object (the good object) that is projected into the other person for safekeeping. The other person is changed by the projection and is dealt with as though he or she is in fact characterized by the aspects of the self that have been projected.

  • Projective tests

  • Psychological diagnostic tests in which the test material is unstructured so that any response will reflect a projection of some aspect of the subject's underlying personality and psychopathology

  • Prosopagnosia

  • Inability to recognize familiar faces that is not explained by defective visual acuity or reduced consciousness or alertness.

  • Pseudocyesis

  • Included in DSM-IV as one of the somatoform disorders. It is characterized by a false belief of being pregnant and by the occurrence of signs of being pregnant, such as abdominal enlargement, breast engorgement, and labor pains.

  • Pseudodementia

  • A syndrome in which dementia is mimicked or caricatured by a functional psychiatric illness. Symptoms and response of mental status examination questions are similar to those found in verified cases of dementia. In pseudodementia, the chief diagnosis to be considered in the differential is depression in an older person vs. cognitive deterioration on the basis of organic brain disease.

  • Psychiatric Nurse

  • A master's-prepared clinical specialist in psychiatric mental health nursing.

  • Psychiatrist

  • A medical doctor who specializes in the treatment of mental, emotional or behavioral problems.

  • Psychodynamic therapy

  • A branch of psychotherapy that deals with the psychology of mental or emotional forces or processes developed in early childhood and their effects on behavior and mental states.

  • Psychologist

  • A specialist in the diagnosis and treatment of mental and emotional problems. Because psychologists are not physicians, they cannot prescribe drugs. Their role with patients usually involves testing, counseling and psychotherapy.

  • Psychomotor agitation

  • Excessive motor activity associated with a feeling of inner tension. When severe, agitation may involve shouting and loud complaining. The activity is usually nonproductive and repetitious, and consists of such behavior as pacing, wringing of hands, and inability to sit still.

  • Psychomotor retardation

  • Visible generalized slowing of movements and speech.

  • Psychosexual development

  • A series of stages from infancy to adulthood, relatively fixed in time, determined by the interaction between a person's biological drives and the environment. With resolution of this interaction, a balanced, reality-oriented development takes place; with disturbance, fixation and conflict ensue. This disturbance may remain latent or give rise to characterological or behavioral disorders.

  • Psychosis

  • A mental disturbance characterized by a loss of contact with reality. Delusions and hallucinations are often present.

  • Psychosocial

  • Involving both psychological and social aspects or relating social conditions to mental health.

  • Psychosocial Rehabilitation

  • Therapeutic activities or interventions provided individually or in groups that may include development and maintenance of daily and community-living skills, self-care, skills training includes grooming, bodily care, feeding, social skills training, and development of basic language skills.

  • Psychosomatic

  • Pertaining to the relationship of the mind and body. Psychosomatic illnesses are those in which physical symptoms are caused or aggravated by emotional factors.

  • Psychotherapist

  • Term for anyone who provides psychotherapy, with or without specialized licensure or training.

  • Psychotherapy

  • The treatment of mental and emotional disorders using psychological methods, such as talk therapy.

  • Psychotic

  • This term has historically received a number of different definitions, none of which has achieved universal acceptance. The narrowest definition of psychotic is restricted to delusions or prominent hallucinations, with the hallucinations occurring in the absence of insight into their pathological nature. A slightly less restrictive definition would also include prominent hallucinations that the individual realizes are hallucinatory experiences. Broader still is a definition that also includes other positive symptoms of Schizophrenia (i.e., disorganized speech, grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior). Unlike these definitions based on symptoms, the definition used in DSM-II and ICD-9 was probably far too inclusive and focused on the severity of functional impairment, so that a mental disorder was termed psychotic if it resulted in 'impairment that grossly interferes with the capacity to meet ordinary demands of life.' Finally, the term has been defined conceptually as a loss of ego boundaries or a gross impairment in reality testing. Based on their characteristic features, the different disorders in DSM-IV emphasize different aspects of the various definitions of psychotic.

  • Psychotropic medication

  • Medication that affects thought processes or feeling states.

  • Purging

  • People with bulimia engage in a destructive pattern of ridding their bodies of the excess calories (to control their weight) by vomiting, abusing laxatives or diuretics, taking enemas and/or exercising obsessively -- a process called purging.

  • Pyromania

  • A pathological compulsion to set fires.


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Mental Health Related Terms


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