What symptoms in yourself or in your beloved ones should alarm you?

Undoubtedly, you should be alarmed by any radical change in your behaviour or in the behaviour of the person you know well.
To understand better what you should pay attention to, you’d better get to know some basic symptoms of mental illness. They are as follows:

• Disorders of thinking – disorganization of thinking caused by distraction or complete disruption of threads of thought.
• Delusions – false beliefs that cannot be corrected by any persuasion, even by quoting irresistible, from the point of view of logic, arguments in their senselessness..
• Hallucinations – false visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory or sensory perceptions. A patient experiencing hallucinations hears, sees or senses things that are not real. Hallucinations often coexist with delusions providing the patient evidence of the truth of delusions.
• Changing feelings – irrational feelings happen to the patient in a given situation, e.g. agitation, anger or anxiety caused by impaired thinking and perception. In another situation impoverishment of feelings may occur and the person feels indifferent to what is happening around him. Not infrequently, these two states are intertwined.
• Changing behaviour – dissimilarity of behaviour resulting from a change in feelings in comparison with the behaviour known before the disease. Behaviours are the consequence of other productive symptoms and external manifestation of feelings, including irrational agitation or apathy, gestures bizarre for the environment or entire sequences of behavior resulting from disorders of thinking or perceiving experienced by the sick person. For example, a person experiencing gustatory and olfactory hallucinations, and convinced that he is poisoned, will change his behaviour according to this situation. He will refuse to take food, avoid being in polluted areas, show suspicion or outright hostility and aggression in his contacts with alleged persecutors.
• Withdrawal from family and social life (isolation from the environment and lack of interest in things that used to be important).
• Loss of initiative – closely related to withdrawal, causing depletion of active behaviour previously typical of the person. Patients need to be urged and guided often in basic activities of life.
• Poverty of thought and expression – patients often complain of emptiness in the head and reducing thinking to a few permanently returning identical thoughts. This often illustrates the poverty of speech in people previously eloquent.
• Emotional pallor – patients, who have shown emotional reactions so far, now become callous and not interested in their own affairs and those of others, and give the impression of people devoid of feeling

These symptoms do not exhaust the wealth of symptoms of mental disorders. Each patient is affected differently and the symptoms presented by patients sometimes surprise with their diversity.