Suspect Related Issues

Hi friends!

This is Dr. Atul Aswani again and in the previous video, you saw me talking about the stress of urban life and also about depression and anxiety. So, I am also concerned about the bigger problems of psychiatry and one of the biggest problems that we have in psychiatry is the problem of schizophrenia. Now there are some people who are doing well in their professional lives and probably nothing wrong can be figured out when you look at them externally but their family members might tell you that they have a very suspicious nature. So they might be suspecting their spouse that their spouse is having an affair with someone and sometimes paranoid people will say that my neighbor is talking about me, my neighbor is planning to harm me so these are all delusions. Sometimes, these thoughts become so intense that these thoughts become like voices in the mind. Now, this is a condition called paranoid schizophrenia.

There is treatment available for schizophrenia but the difficulty is people who have this problem do not recognize that they have this problem and therefore it is the responsibility of the relatives to take care of a situation like this. The good news is we have a number of medications available to treat schizophrenia and also there is counseling. For example, we can make people think what is the evidence that your spouse may be cheating on you or what is the evidence that your neighbor is spending so much time thinking about you. So, when people do that, then they find that they can gradually distance themselves from the thoughts which are bothering them but as I said before schizophrenia is one big problem in psychiatry and sometimes this can be what we call as the disease of childbearing years where there is a lot of disturbance in someone's social life and occupational life. So the biggest cost of this disease is the loss of income earning years. So I would request you that if you know someone like that, you should not hesitate to take treatment. Now, there the other thing that I would like to talk about is addiction disorders.

So we know that many people like to have some alcohol in a party and sometimes alcohol can be a social drink but then alcohol can become an addiction also and people give you all kinds of reason to justify their addiction and something which is even bigger than alcohol is the addiction to tobacco. The problem with tobacco is that unlike alcohol, it is much more easily available and it is more addictive. What I mean to say here is that you cannot have alcohol and go to your office but you can smoke just outside your office, on the balcony of your office. So, tobacco is actually a bigger problem than alcohol. Again, the good news is that there is medication to treat the addiction to alcohol and to tobacco and there is a lot of development in psychological therapy which might help us to overcome these habits. So if something is a habit and it has been learned then it logically implies that it can even be unlearned and we can back step from this addiction.

Finally, I would like to talk about dementia. Dementia is generally a disorder of the senior years of life and this is a disorder which can look like depression, it can look like anxiety but the basic thing here is that the brain is losing its capacity and its power and this shows up in the loss of memory. So people begin to forget what they had for lunch today, they begin to forget where they kept their keys and sometimes they may become suspicious my maid has taken away the key to the cupboard whereas they may have themselves put the key somewhere else. There is medication for dementia also but the point to be kept in mind is that the faster you start treatment for dementia, the lesser the damage. So, there are many other conditions but in my practice, I deal with adult psychiatry most of the time and these are the conditions which I cover.

Thank you!