Affective disorders are characterized by extreme changes in mood towards uplift or oppression. Most often, such fluctuations are accompanied by disturbances in the level of general activity, and other symptoms of the disease are secondary or appear in the context of an activity and mood disorder.
Affective disorders are referred to endogenous diseases, which are caused by hereditary factors. Most of the deviations are periodically repeated. Sometimes individual episodes of the disease are provoked by stressful situations and events, but more often disorders occur without a visible reason, spontaneously. The relapse of the disease is affected by social factors, conflicts at work, unfavorable conditions in the family, excessive psychological stress associated with life and material difficulties.
The average age at which the onset of disease is observed is about 30 years and can vary widely. In some cases, psychogenic disorders develop in early youth.
Affective disorders include various types of depression.
In the classical case, depression includes a depressed motor, mental affective state of a person. The patient looks depressed, inactive, with a sad look and a frozen expression of sadness. Speech with such a disorder is slow and quiet, perception and thinking are difficult, memory is reduced. In the mood, the predominant feelings are longing, heaviness in the chest, and feelings of tightness. The world around us becomes tarnished for a person, interests are lost, the future seems hopeless. Personal self-esteem decreases, self-accusations and self-reproach arise.
However, more often depressive affective disorders include other symptoms. Fear, anxiety, a feeling of apathy take possession of a sick person. In severe cases, raving relationships, sinfulness, nihilistic ideas appear. The patient may declare that he is already dead, that the world does not exist.
Depending on the characteristics of an affective disorder, one can speak of simple, apathetic, anxious depression or a disease with anxiety-phobic, senesto-hypochondria, despersalization, and other disorders.
Sometimes affective mood disorders are not too obvious, and somatic symptoms appear in the foreground. Patients have complaints of pain in the abdominal organs, heart region, dizziness. In such cases, we can talk about masked depression. Such patients can be unsuccessfully treated by a general practitioner for years without receiving adequate care and without recognizing their own mental disorders. These conditions in somatic practice qualify as neurocirculatory and vegetative-vascular dystonia, spastic colitis, biliary tract dyskensia, etc. Acute attacks of fear are observed against the background of a subdepressive state (stroke, cardiophobia, fear of going crazy, suffocation, death).
Affective disorders include various types of mania, high-mood states, accompanied by ideas of their own importance, hyperactivity. Patients have accelerated speech, verbosity. They become mobile, talkative, easily get in touch, gesticulate a lot. Appetite is increased, and sleep is shortened. With such disorders, sexual desires intensify, and patients can begin to engage in numerous promiscuous sexual intercourse. In some severe cases, affective psychosis occurs, delusions of grandeur, psychomotor agitation are observed , hallucinations and attacks of aggression may occur. Disinhibition and a decrease in self-criticism of behavior can provoke the commission of antisocial acts.