Quantifying psychosis

[thegreenhand]

Recently there's been a lot of threads on here about psychosis in some form or another. These discussions while interesting, tend to devolve somewhat into personal anecdotes of what psychosis really is.

The question I raise to y'all is this: Can psychosis be reliably measured? And if so, what methodologies would you propose?

If you can support your claims with studies that'd be great

 

[Jabberwocky]

A commonly used too is called PSYRATS. Here is a cut and paste description of the basics

The PSYRATS is comprised of 17 items inquiring about the specific dimensions of hallucinations and delusions, with each item being rated from 0 (absent) to 4 (severe). The PSYRATS has 2 subscales: the auditory hallucinations subscale (AHS) consisting of 11 items, and the delusions subscale (DS) consisting of 6 items. The AHS items are Frequency, Duration, Location, Loudness, Origin, Negativity (Amount/Degree), Distress (Amount/Intensity), Disruption, and Controllability. The DS items are Preoccupation (Amount/Duration), Conviction, Distress (Amount/Intensity), and Disruption. Although the AHS and DS subscales have face validity, they do not necessarily reflect the psychological constructs underlying the scale. Identification of these constructs is important for many clinical and research contexts (eg, measuring change in cognitive/biological processes), because when certain PSYRATS items cluster together, that clustering may be caused by some underlying etiological process (eg, duration and disruption items on the AHS could all be affected by sustained hyperactivity in brain networks involving speech-related and auditory perception regions).

 

[thegreenhand]

A commonly used too is called PSYRATS. Here is a cut and paste description of the basics

The PSYRATS is comprised of 17 items inquiring about the specific dimensions of hallucinations and delusions, with each item being rated from 0 (absent) to 4 (severe). The PSYRATS has 2 subscales: the auditory hallucinations subscale (AHS) consisting of 11 items, and the delusions subscale (DS) consisting of 6 items. The AHS items are Frequency, Duration, Location, Loudness, Origin, Negativity (Amount/Degree), Distress (Amount/Intensity), Disruption, and Controllability. The DS items are Preoccupation (Amount/Duration), Conviction, Distress (Amount/Intensity), and Disruption. Although the AHS and DS subscales have face validity, they do not necessarily reflect the psychological constructs underlying the scale. Identification of these constructs is important for many clinical and research contexts (eg, measuring change in cognitive/biological processes), because when certain PSYRATS items cluster together, that clustering may be caused by some underlying etiological process (eg, duration and disruption items on the AHS could all be affected by sustained hyperactivity in brain networks involving speech-related and auditory perception regions).

Interesting stuff, thanks for that. These measurements do however rely on a person to rate them. That doesn't invalidate them by any means but it does have inherent error. I'm wondering if fMRI data might be able to be used to visualize asynchrous activity or hyperactivity for example in specific task networks in the brain.