useful for B.Sc. Forensic Science students

1. Psychological
Disorders
Ravinder Kaur
(Assistant Professor of Forensic Science)
School of Allied Health Science-VMRF-DU

2. Contents
Definition.
Why we need to study psychological disorders?
Classification.
Common disorders.

3. Definition
A Psychological disorder is a syndrome characterized by
a clinically significant disturbance in an individual’s
cognitive, emotion regulation, or behaviour that reflects a
dysfunction in the psychological , biological, or
developmental process underlying mental functioning.
Causes for Psychological disorders:
• fiction of minds .
• misbalance of biological functioning of human sensory
organs.

4. Why we need to study
psychological disorder
Several crimes are committed under the influence of
psychological disorders.
To determine whether the person is shamming insanity to
avoid responsibility for the crime he has committed or is
he really insane.

5. Classification
 AMNESIA
 BIPOLAR DISORDER
 CONFABULATION
 DEMENTIA
 DELIRIUM
 FUGUE STATE
 HALLUCINATION
 ILLUSION
 NEUROSIS
 PSYCHOSIS
 PSYCHOPATHY
 STUPOR

6. AMNESIA
 The term ‘Amnesia’ is originally derived from a Greek word
‘mnesia’ meaning ‘memory’ and ‘a’ means ‘without’.
 Thus, amnesia is in fact a dearth in memory damage in brain.
 Causes:
• illness
• psychological disturbance
• use of several sedatives and hypnotic drugs
 The memory can be either entirely or incompletely lost
according to the extent of damage that was caused.

7. Classification
Retrograde amnesia: It is the incapability to
recover information that was attained before a
specific date, typically the date of a fortune or
operation.
Anterograde amnesia: It is the incapability
to convey new information from the short-
term store into the long-term store.
Individuals with this form of amnesia will not
remember things for long periods of time.

8. Symptoms
A severe reduction in the ability to learn innovative
material and retrieve old information can be observed.
Patients can learn new procedural knowledge.
Amnesic patients also preserve considerable
knowledgeable, verbal and social skill in spite of
thoughtful damages in the skill to remember particular
information encountered in prior learning episodes.

9. BIOPOLAR DISORDER
Bipolar Disorder, also known as bipolar affective
disorder, manic-depressive disorder, or manic depression,
is a mental illness characterized by episodes of an
elevated mood known as mania, usually alternating with
episodes of depression.
Causes:
• genetic issues
• environmental threat issues

10. Symptoms
 During mania a person looks unusually happy, active, or
irritable, but frequently makes poor choices due to impractical
ideas or poor regard of consequences.
 Manic and depressive incidents can damage the person's skill
to work in normal life.
 A constant feelings of grief, nervousness, guilt, anger,
separation, hopelessness, disturbances in sleep and appetite,
exhaustion and lack of interest in usually pleasurable activities,
difficulties focused, aloneness, apathy, depersonalization, lack
of interest in sexual activity, shyness or social nervousness,
irritability, chronic pain (with or without a identified cause),
absence of inspiration and dark suicidal thoughts.

11. CONFABULATION
 Confabulation is a disturbance in memory which can be well-
defined as the fabrication of fictitious, distorted or
misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world, devoid of
the sensible intent to mislead.
 Confabulation is differentiated from lying as there is no intent
to trick and the individual is ignorant the information is false.
 Causes:
• brain injuries
• dementias, like Alzheimer's disease or Wernicke–Korsakoff
syndrome (a common manifestation of thiamine deficiency
caused by alcoholism).

12. Symptoms
Persons who confabulate display inappropriate memories
fluctuating from delicate changes to inexplicable
fabrications, and are usually very self-reliant about their
recollections, despite contradictory evidences.
It also can comprise nonfictional and non-personal
information, like historical evidences, fairy tales or other
parts of semantic memory.
 Apparently, the description can be imaginary or coherent.
 Both the evidence and the particulars of the account can
be false.

13. DEMENTIA
Dementia is an extensive class of brain diseases that
causes long term loss of ability to think and reason
clearly, that is starkly adequate to upset an individual's
daily working.
Causes:
• Age.

14. Symptoms
 Dementia disturbs the brain's capability to think motive and remember clearly.
 The most usual affected areas comprise memory, visual-spatial, linguistic,
consideration and administrative function (problem resolving).
 Depression and anxiety.
 Agitation.
 Balance difficulties.
 Agitation Speech and linguistic trouble.
 Trouble eating or swallowing.
 Delusions (often believing people are stealing from them) or hallucinations.
 Memory alterations (considering that a memory has already occurred when it has
not, thinking an old memory is a new one, joining two memories, or puzzling the
people in a memory).
 Wandering or restlessness.

15. DELIRIUM
‘Delirium’ or ‘Severe Confusional Condition’ is a
disorder that exists in two elementary forms. In its
hyperactive form, it is exhibited as severe misperception
and confusion, emerging with moderately fast
commencement and fluctuating in intensity whereas, in
its hypoactive form, it is revealed by a correspondingly
rapid withdrawal from interaction with the world.
Causes:
• Serious illness
• Age

16. Symptoms
It characteristically includes other cognitive deficits,
variations in arousal (hyperactive, hypoactive, or mixed),
perceptual deficits, changed 24 hours cycle and psychotic
symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions.

17. FUGUE STATE
 A ‘Fugue State’, officially ‘Dissociative Fugue’ or ‘Psychogenic
Fugue’, is an uncommon psychiatric disorder recognized by
reversible amnesia for personal identity, comprising the memories,
personality and other recognizing features of individuality.
 The stage is generally short-lived (fluctuating from hours to days),
but can last months or longer.
 Causes:
• consumption of psychotropic substances
• physical trauma
• common medical situation
• psychiatric circumstances like delirium, dementia, Bipolar Disorder
or depression.

18. Symptoms
Dissociative Fugue generally includes unexpected travel
or thinking and is occasionally supplemented by the
founding of an innovative individuality.
After retrieval from fugue, former memories generally
return unbroken, but there is usually amnesia for the
fugue incident.

19. HALLUCINATION
 A hallucination is an opinion in the lack of apparent stimulus that has
potentials of actual awareness.
 Hallucinations are vivid, considerable and situated in exterior objective
space.
 They are differentiated from the connected phenomena of dreaming,
which does not comprise sleeplessness.
 Hallucinations also diverge from "delusional perceptions", in which an
appropriately detected and interpreted stimulus (i.e., a real perception) is
given some additional significance.
 Causes:
• drug use (particularly deliriants)
• sleep deprivation
• psychosis
• neurological disorders

20. Classification
Visual Hallucination: Visual hallucination is the 'seeing of things that are not
there‘. Stronger hallucinogenics have been described to have an effect leading the
user to see him/her self in a different world and having a different life
Auditory Hallucination: Auditory hallucinations (also called as paracusia) are the
insight of sound without any stimulus. Auditory hallucinations are very general in
Paranoid Schizophrenia
Tactile Hallucination: Tactile hallucinations are the deception of tangible sensory
input, pretending several kinds of force on the membrane or other organs. Like
sensation of insects crawling underneath the skin and is frequently associated with
prolonged cocaine use.
Gustatory Hallucination: It is the perception of taste without a stimulus. These
hallucinations, which are typically strange or unpleasant, are relatively common
among individuals who have certain types of focal epilepsy, especially temporal
lobe epilepsy.

21. Symptoms
Person may watch movement in peripheral vision or
audible range dim sounds. Like auditory hallucinations,
the source of the visual matching part can also be after
the patient's back.
They may have feeling of being looked or stared at,
usually with malicious intent.
 Often, auditory hallucinations and their graphic
counterpart are felt by the patient together.

22. ILLUSION
The term illusion refers to a specific form of sensory
distortion.
 Unlike a hallucination, which is a distortion in the
absence of a stimulus, an illusion describes a
misinterpretation of a true sensation.
For example, hearing voices regardless of the
environment would be a hallucination, whereas hearing
voices in the sound of running water (or other auditory
source) would be an illusion.

23. Classification
Optical Illusion: An optical illusion is identified by visually seen images that are
not true or misguiding. Thus, the information collected by the eye is evaluated by
the brain to give, on the face of it, a percept that does not match with a physical
measurement of the stimulus source. The human brain forms a world within our
head according to what it samples from the surrounding environment
Auditory Illusion: An auditory illusion is an illusion of listening, the sound equal
to an optical illusion: the listener hears either sounds which does not exist in the
stimulus, or "impossible" sounds.
Tactile Illusion: Tactile illusions are illusions that exploit the feeling of touch.
One of the best known tactile illusions is the cutaneous rabbit illusion, in which a
sequence of taps at two separated skin locations results in the perception that
intervening skin area were also tapped

24. Symptoms
Though illusions distort reality, they are generally shared
by most people.
 Illusions may occur with any of the human senses, but
visual illusions (optical illusions) are the most well-
known and understood.
The emphasis on visual illusions occurs because vision
often dominates the other senses.

25. NEUROSIS
Neurosis is a class of functional mental disorders
including distress on the other hand neither delusions nor
hallucinations, whereby behaviour is not outside socially
acceptable norms.
Thus the contact with the reality is not lost. It is also
called as psychoneurosis or neurotic disorder, and thus
those undergoing from it are called to be neurotic.

26. Classification
Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
Anxiety Neurosis
Hysteria (in which anxiety may be
discharged through a physical symptom)
Infinite diversity of terrors as well as
fascinations such as pyromania.

27. Symptoms
 Nervousness
 Sadness or depression
 Irritability
 Mental confusion
 Low feeling of self-worth
 phobic avoidance,
 obsessive acts
 tiredness
 unpleasant or troubling views
 repetition of opinions and fascination
 habitual fantasizing

28. PSYCHOSIS
The term Psychosis is originally derived from the Greek
words ‘psyche’ meaning ‘mind/soul’ and ‘-osis’ meaning
‘abnormal condition or derangement’ refers to an
abnormal condition of the mind.
It is a nonspecific psychiatric term for a mental condition
frequently defined as comprising a "loss of contact with
reality".
 Individuals suffering from psychosis are described as
psychotic.

29. Symptoms
Hallucinations.
 Delusions.
Violence.
Personality variations.
Uncommon or strange behaviour.
Trouble with social communication.
 Damage in carrying out daily life activities.

30. PSYCHOPATHY
Psychopathy or sociopathy is usually well-defined as a
personality disorder categorized by enduring antisocial
behaviour, diminished empathy and disinhibited or bold
behaviour.

31. STUPOR
Stupor is defined as the lack of serious cognitive function
and level of consciousness in which a subject is almost
completely unresponsive and only reacts to base stimuli
such as pain.

32. Symptoms
Stiff and silent and only looks to be aware as the eyes are
open and follow nearby objects.
 Being recognized by injuries of reactions to external
stimuli, it is generally seen in infectious diseases,
complicated toxic states, severe hypothermia, mental
illnesses (e.g. schizophrenia, severe clinical depression)
and so on.

33. Common Disorders
responsible for Crime
• Kleptomania- Irresistible desire to steal articles of little
value.
• Pyromania- Irresistible desire to set fire to things.
• Dipsomania- Irresistible desire to use alcoholic drinks.
• Multilomania- Irresistible desire to mutilate animals.
• Trichotilomania- Irresistible desire to pull out own hair.

34. THANK
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