Research is uncovering cases of severe psychosis in patients with coronavirus.
A Los Angeles patient who was in the care of COVID-19 also developed a severe mental disorder.
“We currently have a patient who is receiving treatment for COVID. And while treatment for COVID has psychosis and has arisen with beliefs that are totally bizarre abnormal,” Drs. Steven Siegel, psychiatrist at USC Keck Medicine.
Siegel explained that people with psychosis experience thoughts and emotions so deteriorated that they lose touch with reality.
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“People believe the police are chasing them or their families are trying to hurt them,” he said.
Individual reports of coronavirus-related psychosis have been documented in medical journals. Some experts suspect that the cause could be the body’s immune system response or inflammation caused by the disease.
Dr. Charles Casassa is a neurologist at Loma Linda University Health, in the California Inner Empire region.
“We see symptoms related to inflammation of the brain, which can include confusion and rarely psychosis,” he said.
Casassa studied the effects of COVID-19 in patients with epilepsy and found that the virus can cause more seizures.
“We have also found that there are some patients who do not have a history of seizures before they may later have seizures once infected with COVID,” he said.
Research on how COVID-19 affects the brain is still in its early days. How long psychosis episodes can last and who is vulnerable are questions that need to be answered. However, Siegel says people should keep in mind that the disease is very rare.
“This is much more extreme. An extreme rarity than something I think people need to spend their energy worrying about,” Siegel said. “It probably won’t happen.”
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