Recognition
Naming which phenomenon a described presentation belongs to — the entry-level move from an observation/report to the correct descriptive category, without yet inferring a diagnosis.
Cognitive operation: RECOGNIZE · 205 items
Deliberate practice, not a test. Items are organised by target (phenomenon or defence) and by evidence axis. Nothing here is scored, graded or recorded — you weigh the prompt, then reveal the worked phenomenological reasoning. Fictional teaching material.
Recognise · Abnormal Emotional Reaction select
Abnormal Emotional Reaction
After a minor disagreement with a colleague, a man remains intensely angry and preoccupied with the incident for several days, an ordinary feeling of anger but clearly out of proportion to the minor trigger, though he can still readily identify what set it off. What is this?
Recognise · Abnormal Expression of Emotion select
Abnormal Expression of Emotion
A patient who is clearly deeply upset by a recent loss nonetheless deliberately maintains a composed, matter-of-fact manner in front of others, later admitting, when asked, that she is consciously suppressing any outward sign of how she feels. What is this?
Recognise · Acute Dystonia select
Acute Dystonia
Two days after starting an antipsychotic medication, a patient suddenly develops a frightening, sustained spasm that forcibly twists his neck to one side. What is this?
Recognise · Blunting of Affect select
Blunting of Affect
Throughout a lengthy interview covering both distressing and positive topics, a man's facial expression, vocal tone, and gestures remain noticeably reduced and flat across every subject discussed. He does not appear to notice or comment on this himself. What is this?
Recognise · Constriction of Affect select
Constriction of Affect
Across a long conversation covering many different topics, a patient displays only a narrow range of emotional reactions, though the few emotions she does show, such as brief irritation or mild amusement, register with roughly normal intensity each time. What is this?
Recognise · Affective Incontinence select
Affective Incontinence
A patient suddenly breaks into intense, uncontrollable crying triggered by a minor comment, with almost no ability to hold it back and little matching inner sadness behind the display. What is this?
Recognise · Agnostic Alexia select
Agnostic Alexia
A patient with normal vision and normal hearing can describe the individual letter-shapes on a page perfectly well, but cannot make any sense of written words as language; his spoken language comprehension and production are entirely normal. What is this?
Recognise · Akathisia select
Akathisia
A man started an antipsychotic ten days ago and now cannot sit still during the consultation, repeatedly shifting his weight from foot to foot and pacing when he is asked to wait. He describes an intense inner restlessness and unease that is, if anything, more distressing to him than the visible movement itself. What is this?
Recognise · Akinetic Mutism select
Akinetic Mutism
A patient with a lesion affecting the third ventricle lies still with eyes open, giving a superficial appearance of alertness, but is unresponsive, uncooperative, and shows only slight reactivity to painful stimuli. On recovery, he has total amnesia for the entire episode. What is this?
Recognise · Ambitendency select
Ambitendency
Asked to shake hands, a patient makes a series of tentative, incomplete movements toward the examiner's hand, repeatedly starting and stopping without ever actually completing the handshake, appearing genuinely caught in conflict about whether to carry out the action. What is this?
Recognise · Amnesia select
Amnesia
Following a head injury, a patient is simply unable to recall anything from the several hours immediately surrounding the accident. She does not offer any account, false or otherwise, of that period — she is straightforwardly aware that the memory is missing. What is this?
Recognise · Amnestic State select
Amnestic State
A patient following prolonged heavy alcohol use and poor nutrition cannot recall anything told to her five minutes ago and cannot recall events from the past several weeks, yet she can hold a fluent conversation, recall her childhood clearly, and immediately repeat a phone number just given to her. What is this?
Recognise · Anankastic Personality Disorder select
Anankastic Personality Disorder
A man insists on a fixed daily schedule that has not varied in years, becomes visibly distressed by any last-minute change of plan, and has caused repeated friction at work by requiring colleagues to follow his own precise standards for filing paperwork, to the point of damaging his working relationships. What does this represent?
Recognise · Anhedonia select
Anhedonia
A 39-year-old man who has played guitar for pleasure most evenings for twenty years continues to pick it up out of habit, but reports that it now feels like going through empty motions, with none of the satisfaction or enjoyment it used to bring him, no matter how long he plays. What is this?
Recognise · Anosognosia select
Anosognosia
A 66-year-old woman with a dense left-sided paralysis is asked to raise both arms. She lifts only her right arm, insists she has raised both, and when the doctor points out that her left arm never moved, she calmly says it "must just be a bit tired today" and changes the subject, showing no concern at all. What is this?
Recognise · Anterograde Amnesia select
Anterograde Amnesia
Following a head injury, a woman is alert and able to hold ordinary conversations, but the following day has no memory at all of anything from the several hours immediately after regaining consciousness, despite having behaved and responded appropriately throughout that period. What is this?
Recognise · Movement Disorders Associated with Antipsychotic Medication select
Movement Disorders Associated with Antipsychotic Medication
A patient started on antipsychotic medication two weeks ago describes an inner urge to keep moving that he finds hard to resist, though on observation he only occasionally shifts his weight from foot to foot. What is the general category this presentation belongs to?
Recognise · Anxiety select
Anxiety
A patient describes weeks of persistent apprehension and unease, not tied to any particular object or situation, accompanied by a racing heart, muscle tension, and a churning stomach that come and go but never fully settle. What is this?
Recognise · Anxiety Amnesia select
Anxiety Amnesia
A patient with longstanding generalised anxiety describes gradually worsening forgetfulness over several months, closely tracking her worsening worry and poor concentration, which improves noticeably on the days her anxiety feels more settled. What is this?
Recognise · Anxious Foreboding select
Anxious Foreboding
For several weeks, a woman has carried a persistent sense that something bad or catastrophic is about to happen, though she cannot say what, or to whom, or when — it is not tied to any particular object, situation, or event, just a sustained, uneasy sense of dread hanging over everything. What is this?
Recognise · Anxious Personality Disorder select
Anxious Personality Disorder
A man describes a lifelong, keenly felt wish for close friendships, but says shyness, tension, and a fear of embarrassment have left him isolated and lonely despite that genuine desire for acceptance. He has found some comfort in solitary hobbies, and has managed to form a few close relationships, but only with people he experiences as completely uncritical of him. What is this?
Recognise · Apathy select
Apathy
A patient shows a pervasive lack of interest and motivation across every area of his life — work, relationships, hobbies he once enjoyed — appearing outwardly indifferent even to matters of real significance to his own circumstances, without describing any particular sadness or distress about this state. What is this?
Recognise · Aphasia select
Aphasia
Following a confirmed left-hemisphere stroke, a patient has marked difficulty understanding spoken instructions and producing meaningful speech, while other aspects of his thinking and behaviour remain relatively coherent and organised. What general category of disturbance is this?
Recognise · Auditory Hallucination select
Auditory Hallucination
A man reports hearing a voice, with no one else present, that has the same perceptual quality and force as an actual person speaking aloud in the room, apparently coming from outside his head, saying critical things about him. He makes no effort to produce this and cannot stop it. What is this?
Recognise · Autochthonous Delusion (Sudden Delusional Idea) select
Autochthonous Delusion (Sudden Delusional Idea)
Without any preceding perception, thought, or event that might explain it, a patient suddenly and completely finds himself convinced, fully formed and with total conviction, that he is secretly a member of the royal family, with no gradual development to the idea at all. What is this?
Recognise · Automatic Obedience select
Automatic Obedience
A patient complies with every verbal instruction given during an examination, including one that produces an uncomfortable sensation, and continues to comply with further instructions in the same way immediately afterward, without any adjustment in response to that unpleasant experience. What is this?
Recognise · Autoscopy select
Autoscopy
A man describes, with some alarm, having briefly seen a visual double of himself standing a few feet away, mirroring his own posture and movements. Throughout the experience his own sense of viewpoint stayed exactly where his real body was — he was looking at the double, not looking out from it. What is this experience?
Recognise · La Belle Indifférence select
La Belle Indifférence
A woman presents with a sudden inability to move her left arm, fully consistent with a functional neurological symptom. She describes the paralysis clearly and in detail when asked, but does so with a calm, faintly cheerful manner that seems strikingly out of keeping with the apparent severity of losing the use of a limb. What is this attitude called?
Recognise · Body Image Disturbance select
Body Image Disturbance
A patient reports that her left arm feels as though it has become enormous and grotesquely swollen, though there is no actual physical change and she does not deny that the arm belongs to her. What is this?
Recognise · Borderline Personality Disorder select
Borderline Personality Disorder
A 26-year-old woman describes a new colleague as "the only person who has ever really understood her" within days of meeting them, then, after the colleague cancels a coffee catch-up due to a scheduling conflict, calls them "selfish and uncaring" and says she never wants to see them again. She describes a longstanding pattern like this across many relationships, alongside a persistent feeling of emptiness and an intense fear that people will eventually leave her. What is this presentation most consistent with?
Recognise · Capgras Syndrome select
Capgras Syndrome
A woman with schizophrenia insists, with complete conviction, that her husband has been replaced by an identical-looking impostor, acknowledging he looks exactly like her real husband but maintaining he is "not really him." She becomes hostile toward him as a result. What is this?
Recognise · Catalepsy select
Catalepsy
An examiner lifts a patient's arm, as if taking a pulse, and then releases it. Rather than falling back down, the arm stays exactly where it was placed for well over a minute before slowly sinking back toward a resting position. What is this?
Recognise · Catathymic Amnesia select
Catathymic Amnesia
A patient is unable to recall a single, specific, deeply painful event from several years ago, while her general autobiographical memory, sense of personal identity, and everyday functioning all remain completely intact and unaffected. What is this?
Recognise · Catatonic Speech Disturbance select
Catatonic Speech Disturbance
A patient speaks with a strange, stilted delivery and an unusual falsetto intonation, sounding almost unfamiliar with his own native language, despite using entirely fluent vocabulary and correct grammar. What is this?
Recognise · Catatonic Stupor select
Catatonic Stupor
A patient with schizophrenia lies rigid and mute. Her face is entirely deadpan even as her care team discusses a distressing recent family event in front of her, though her eyes track their movements around the room. She is later found to have been passing urine without any apparent awareness of doing so. What is this presentation?
Recognise · Central Aphasia select
Central Aphasia
A patient's spontaneous speech shows faulty grammar and sentence structure along with word-substitution errors, and he also has clear difficulty understanding what is said to him, with both his speaking and his writing impaired. What is this?
Recognise · Chromatopsia select
Chromatopsia
A patient reports that everything he looks at appears washed in an abnormal yellow tinge, though he still correctly recognises every object and its shape; the tinge resolves once his medication is adjusted. What is this?
Recognise · Circumstantiality select
Circumstantiality
Asked a simple question about when his symptoms began, a man gives a long, detailed, meandering account full of unnecessary tangents, and each time you try to redirect him he briefly returns to the point before digressing again. Eventually, several minutes later, he does answer the original question. What is this?
Recognise · Compulsion select
Compulsion
A patient feels driven to check that the front door is locked exactly seven times before he can leave the house, recognising the behaviour as excessive and unreasonable, but experiencing significant anxiety if he tries to resist it, anxiety that is relieved once he completes the checking. What is this?
Recognise · Confabulation select
Confabulation
A 61-year-old man with a long history of heavy alcohol use is asked what he did yesterday. He answers immediately and confidently that he watched his grandson's football match and had lunch with his sister. His grandson does not play football, and his sister lives abroad and has not visited in over a year. He shows no hesitation and becomes mildly irritated when the discrepancy is gently pointed out, insisting his account is accurate. What is this?
Recognise · Cryptamnesia select
Cryptamnesia
A writer produces a passage that closely matches, almost word for word, a paragraph she read years earlier in someone else's book, sincerely believing the passage to be entirely her own original creation, with no awareness that she is reproducing something she previously encountered. What is this?
Recognise · Déjà Vu select
Déjà Vu
While chatting with a new colleague for the first time, a 31-year-old man is suddenly gripped by an intense, specific certainty that this exact conversation has happened before, word for word. The feeling lasts only a few seconds before fading, leaving him slightly unsettled but otherwise unbothered, and he knows perfectly well it cannot actually have happened before. What is this?
Recognise · Delusion select
Delusion
A patient states, with complete and unshakeable conviction, that he is the reincarnation of an ancient king, offering no coherent account of how he arrived at this belief and showing no interest in any evidence that might challenge it, despite this being entirely out of keeping with his cultural background. What is this?
Recognise · Delusion of Guilt select
Delusion of Guilt
A 58-year-old man with severe depressive illness insists that he is "the most wicked man who has ever lived," that he personally caused a distant relative's illness through some unspecified moral failing years ago, and that he deserves to be imprisoned for it. He cannot be reassured by evidence that he did nothing wrong. What is this?
Recognise · Delusion of Ill Health select
Delusion of Ill Health
A patient is convinced her bowels have "rotted away inside her" and that she is dying of an incurable disease, despite entirely normal investigations and repeated reassurance from several doctors. She cannot be persuaded otherwise even when shown her own normal test results. What is this?
Recognise · Delusion of Infidelity select
Delusion of Infidelity
A man with a long history of alcohol dependence becomes convinced his wife is having an affair, searching her clothing daily for "evidence" and reinterpreting entirely ordinary events (a late bus, a changed hairstyle) as confirmation. No amount of reassurance changes his conviction. What is this best described as?
Recognise · Delusion of Love select
Delusion of Love
A woman with no prior relationship with a well-known local celebrity becomes utterly convinced he is secretly in love with her and has been sending her coded signals through his public appearances. When he makes no contact, she concludes his letters must be being intercepted. What is this?
Recognise · Delusion of Persecution select
Delusion of Persecution
A patient is fixedly convinced, with no realistic basis, that a specific government agency is monitoring his every move and plotting to harm him, a belief that has been present and unshaken for months despite no supporting evidence whatsoever. What is this?
Recognise · Delusion of Poverty select
Delusion of Poverty
A retired teacher with severe depressive illness, who in reality has a comfortable pension and substantial savings, becomes utterly convinced she and her family are about to be made destitute, refusing to spend money even on basic food and remaining unmoved when shown her own bank statements. What is this?
Recognise · Delusional Mood select
Delusional Mood
A patient describes several days of a vague but powerful sense that something important is happening around him and that it concerns him personally, though he cannot say what it actually is, accompanied by marked unease, before this feeling resolves into a specific, crystallised belief. What is this?
Recognise · Delusional Perception select
Delusional Perception
A man recalls that while waiting at a bus stop, a stranger across the road tied her shoelace — and at that exact moment he became completely and instantly certain that he had been chosen to expose corruption in the local council. He cannot explain any logical link between the shoelace and this conclusion, only that the certainty was total and arrived at once. What is this experience?
Recognise · Demoralization select
Demoralization
A man with a chronic, painful joint condition describes feeling discouraged and unable to cope with his situation, but he still enjoys visiting his grandchildren, still looks forward to his favourite television programme, and his low feeling is clearly and understandably tied to his ongoing physical struggle. What is this?
Recognise · Denial select
Denial
Told of a serious cancer diagnosis, a patient accepts the practical facts on the surface but continues making long-term plans exactly as before, behaving as though the emotional reality of the diagnosis has simply not registered. What is this?
Recognise · Dependent Personality Disorder select
Dependent Personality Disorder
A 33-year-old man says he cannot decide what to order at a restaurant without his wife choosing for him first, has never lived alone, and describes feeling "lost" and anxious whenever she is away for more than a day, going to great lengths to keep her from leaving even briefly. He is quiet and self-effacing, and describes himself as needing someone else to take charge of most areas of his life. What is this most consistent with?
Recognise · Depersonalisation select
Depersonalisation
A 22-year-old university student says that for the past few days it has felt like she is watching herself walk around campus instead of actually being there. She is clear that she still knows it is her and that she has not stopped existing — it just doesn't feel like it. What is this experience?
Recognise · Depressive Illness select
Depressive Illness
For several weeks, a patient has experienced low mood present for most of the day, most days, loss of interest and pleasure in activities he previously enjoyed, disturbed early-morning waking, poor concentration, reduced energy, and feelings of worthlessness, all extending pervasively across every area of his life. What is this?
Recognise · Depressive Pseudodementia select
Depressive Pseudodementia
A 74-year-old man is referred for suspected dementia after his family notices he can no longer manage his bills or recall recent conversations. On assessment he is profoundly low in mood and tearfully aware of and distressed by his own decline. After eight weeks of antidepressant treatment, his cognitive performance returns almost entirely to baseline. What is this presentation?
Recognise · Depressive Stupor select
Depressive Stupor
A profoundly depressed patient becomes almost completely withdrawn and unresponsive, with a facial expression that remains recognisably sad and worsens noticeably when family matters are mentioned, normal muscle tone throughout, and no catalepsy, stereotypies, or incontinence. What is this?
Recognise · Derealisation select
Derealisation
After several nights of very little sleep during a stressful exam period, a 20-year-old student says that walking across campus started to feel like walking through a film set, with the buildings and people around him oddly flat and distant. He is clear throughout that nothing has really changed and that the strangeness is happening in his own perception. What is this?
Recognise · Desultory Thinking select
Desultory Thinking
A patient's speech remains grammatically correct throughout, but is repeatedly interrupted by sudden, unconnected ideas forcing their way in, each one coherent on its own but disrupting the intended flow of thought. What is this?
Recognise · Disorders of Expressive Movement select
Disorders of Expressive Movement
A patient with severe depression sits with a permanently sad expression, makes almost no spontaneous hand gestures, and moves slowly and stiffly even when trying to express how she feels. What is this?
Recognise · Disorientation select
Disorientation
An elderly man admitted to hospital cannot say what day or month it is, but can correctly identify that he is in a hospital and can correctly name his wife when she visits. What is the underlying finding, and what does the pattern tell you about its severity?
Recognise · Dissocial Personality Disorder select
Dissocial Personality Disorder
A man has a long history of exploiting others for personal gain, shows no genuine remorse when confronted with the harm he has caused, offers only superficial apologies before repeating the same behaviour, and describes a childhood marked by conduct disorder and cruelty to animals. He is capable of superficial charm but this drops abruptly once it no longer serves him. What is this pattern?
Recognise · Dissociation of Affect select
Dissociation of Affect
A patient describes a serious road traffic accident she was involved in, in a calm, matter-of-fact tone with no visible distress, while her emotional responses to other, unrelated topics discussed in the same interview remain entirely normal and appropriately expressed. What is this?
Recognise · Dissociative Amnesia select
Dissociative Amnesia
Following a violent assault, a woman is found wandering in an unfamiliar town, unable to recall her name, address, or any personal history, yet she has navigated public transport and interacted appropriately with several strangers along the way. What is this?
Recognise · Distortion of Recall select
Distortion of Recall
A patient confidently describes a detailed childhood memory of an event that, family members confirm, never actually happened — the content of the memory itself has been invented, though she experiences it with the same felt sense of familiarity as her genuine memories. What is this?
Recognise · Distortion of Recognition select
Distortion of Recognition
A man briefly, on entering an entirely new office building for the first time, has a strong and striking sense that he has been in this exact place before, though he immediately recognises this can't actually be true, and the feeling passes within moments. What category of disturbance is this?
Recognise · Distractibility select
Distractibility
During an interview, a patient's attention is repeatedly pulled away by every small sound or movement in the room, and he takes far longer than expected to stop reacting each time a background noise recurs. What is this?
Recognise · Disturbance of Consciousness select
Disturbance of Consciousness
A previously sharply-dressed, punctual bank manager is found unshaven, disoriented to the day and date, and unable to give a coherent account of the last few hours, following a high fever. His usual social presentation and occupation make this level of disorganisation clearly out of keeping with his known baseline. What does this represent?
Recognise · Disturbance of Awareness of Self-Activity select
Disturbance of Awareness of Self-Activity
A patient describes a persistent, distressing feeling that her own thoughts and actions no longer feel like they belong to her, though she recognises this as a strange change in how things feel rather than believing she has ceased to exist. What is this?
Recognise · Disturbance of the Boundaries of the Self select
Disturbance of the Boundaries of the Self
A patient describes a frightening conviction that his own thoughts are somehow reaching outward and directly controlling events happening to other people, as though the ordinary boundary between his mind and the outside world has broken down. What is this?
Recognise · Disturbance of the Continuity of Self select
Disturbance of the Continuity of Self
Following a severe illness, a patient describes feeling profoundly changed, as though she is no longer the same person she was before, with a strong sense that her old self is gone and someone new has taken her place, though she recognises this describes a change over time rather than feeling like two people right now. What is this?
Recognise · Disturbance of the Immediate Awareness of Self-Unity select
Disturbance of the Immediate Awareness of Self-Unity
A woman describes moments where she feels as though she is two people acting at the same time, one part of her speaking automatically as if driven by another part of herself. She is clear, though, that this is only how it feels — she does not actually believe she is literally two separate people. What is this?
Recognise · Dream-Like Change of Consciousness select
Dream-Like Change of Consciousness
Recovering from a severe chest infection, a 79-year-old man becomes convinced that small rodents are scurrying across his hospital bedsheets at night, reacting with genuine terror and swatting at them repeatedly. During the day he is calmer, though still unable to say what day it is, and he recognises his wife immediately whenever she visits. What is this presentation?
Recognise · Drivelling Thinking select
Drivelling Thinking
Attempting to explain a single, complex idea, a patient produces all the right individual pieces of the thought, but they emerge jumbled and disorganised, so that the overall meaning becomes obscured, while the patient herself seems uneasily aware that something about her explanation isn't right. What is this?
Recognise · Dysmegalopsia select
Dysmegalopsia
A patient looks at a real chair across the room and reports that it appears tiny, as though seen from a great distance, though she knows perfectly well it is an ordinary-sized chair nearby. What is this?
Recognise · Echolalia select
Echolalia
Asked 'How are you feeling today?', a patient replies 'How are you feeling today?' rather than answering, and this pattern repeats for several subsequent questions regardless of their content, with no evidence the patient understands what is being repeated. What is this?
Recognise · Echopraxia select
Echopraxia
During a ward assessment, a 26-year-old man with catatonia claps his hands and snaps his fingers each time the assessing nurse does so, apparently without noticing he is doing it, continuing until she deliberately stops moving her hands. What is this?
Recognise · Ecstasy select
Ecstasy
For a brief period, a patient experiences an overwhelming, transcendent state of rapture, describing a profound sense of unity with the universe and access to ultimate truth, an intensity of feeling well beyond ordinary happiness, before the episode passes. What is this?
Recognise · Eidetic Imagery select
Eidetic Imagery
A patient with a history of hallucinogenic drug use describes recalling a scene from months earlier with an unusually vivid, almost picture-like clarity, but is entirely clear that this is a memory of something she genuinely saw at the time, not a current perception of something happening now. What is this?
Recognise · Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder select
Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder
In one major classification system, a clinician describes a patient's presentation as falling under a broader diagnostic umbrella that groups together two related but distinguishable patterns of poor emotional and behavioural control, one centred on explosive outbursts and one on unstable relationships and self-image. What is the umbrella term being used here?
Recognise · Enduring Personality Change after a Catastrophic Experience select
Enduring Personality Change after a Catastrophic Experience
A previously outgoing, trusting man develops, in the three years since surviving a violent hostage situation, a lasting and pervasive change in character: he has become socially withdrawn, hostile and mistrustful of others, and describes a constant, chronic sense of being under threat, with no personality difficulties of any kind documented before the event. What is this?
Recognise · Excitement select
Excitement
A patient in a manic episode is restless, cheerful, and interfering, talking rapidly with flight of ideas and occasionally rushing about and shouting, with the overall picture one of markedly increased motor activity throughout. What is this?
Recognise · Expressive Aphasia select
Expressive Aphasia
A patient understands everything said to him and clearly knows what he wants to say, but can only produce a handful of expletives and fixed phrases, delivered with different intonation each time to try to convey different meanings, visibly frustrated by his inability to say more. What is this?
Recognise · Extended Suicide select
Extended Suicide
A mother with severe, delusional depressive illness, believing she has passed an incurable inherited curse on to her children that guarantees them a life of suffering, kills both her children and then attempts to take her own life, describing this afterward, within her belief system, as an act of protecting them. What is this pattern called?
Recognise · Extracampine Hallucination select
Extracampine Hallucination
A patient reports seeing a figure standing directly behind his own head, a location entirely outside the physical range his eyes could actually perceive, describing the image with the same full conviction and sensory quality as anything he might see in front of him. What is this?
Recognise · False Memory select
False Memory
A man confidently and in vivid detail describes attending a family event that, according to every other family member present and all available records, simply never took place. He is not lying — he genuinely believes it happened and experiences the memory with full conviction. What is this?
Recognise · False Reconnaissance select
False Reconnaissance
A patient in an acute confusional state repeatedly greets several strangers on the ward as though they were old friends, while also occasionally insisting that his own genuinely familiar nurse is actually a stranger he has never met. What is this?
Recognise · Flashback select
Flashback
A war veteran describes sudden, unbidden moments where he is abruptly plunged back into the sights and sounds of combat, feeling for those moments as though it is happening again right now, complete with the original fear and physical tension. What is this?
Recognise · Flashbulb Memory select
Flashbulb Memory
Many years after a major national tragedy, a woman can describe in vivid, precise detail exactly where she was standing, what she was wearing, and who she was with when she first heard the news, and she is completely confident this memory is accurate down to the smallest detail — though she has never had it independently verified. What is this?
Recognise · Flight of Ideas select
Flight of Ideas
Asked how she has been sleeping, a 34-year-old woman in an elated mood replies, "Sleeping, sheep, I counted sheep, sheep go to the meadow, meadow like the perfume my mother wore, my mother's coming to visit, visit, a visit to the seaside would be lovely wouldn't it," continuing in this vein for several minutes without ever returning to the original question, though each individual link is easy enough to follow. What is this?
Recognise · Forced Grasping select
Forced Grasping
A patient is explicitly told not to shake the examiner's hand on future occasions, yet continues to shake it every single time it is offered, despite the instruction being repeated before each attempt. What is this?
Recognise · Formal Thought Disorder select
Formal Thought Disorder
During an unstructured conversation, a patient's speech drifts between ideas with connections that are difficult or impossible to follow, blending unrelated concepts together and occasionally using ordinary words in oddly literal ways, making the overall structure of what she is saying hard to grasp even though individual sentences are grammatically intact. What is this?
Recognise · Functional Hallucination select
Functional Hallucination
A 40-year-old woman notices that every time she runs the kitchen tap, she hears a voice muttering indistinctly beneath the sound of the water. She can hear the water perfectly normally the whole time, and the voice stops the instant she turns the tap off. What is this?
Recognise · Ganser Syndrome select
Ganser Syndrome
A man in custody gives consistently approximate answers to simple questions, while also appearing disoriented, with clouded consciousness and occasional visual hallucinations, and later has no memory of the episode at all. What is this?
Recognise · Gegenhalten (Opposition) select
Gegenhalten (Opposition)
On examination, gentle attempts to passively move a patient's arm meet almost no resistance, but when the examiner applies firmer pressure, the patient's arm resists with a force that closely matches whatever force is being applied, so the limb seems to actively oppose being moved. What is this?
Recognise · Grandiose Delusion select
Grandiose Delusion
A man with elevated mood, reduced need for sleep, and pressured speech becomes convinced he has been chosen to negotiate world peace personally, describing detailed plans to meet with heads of state who he says are "already expecting him." He cannot be persuaded this is unrealistic. What is this?
Recognise · Gustatory Hallucination select
Gustatory Hallucination
A patient reports a persistent, unpleasant metallic taste in her mouth despite having eaten or drunk nothing, occurring alongside a smell of something burning that nobody else can detect. What is the taste symptom, specifically?
Recognise · Hallucination select
Hallucination
In a quiet, empty room with no external sound source present, a patient clearly and repeatedly hears a voice commenting on his actions, experienced with the same sense of reality as an ordinary sound, while he otherwise perceives the room around him accurately. What is this?
Recognise · Hallucinosis select
Hallucinosis
A 55-year-old man with a decades-long history of heavy drinking describes hearing threatening voices discussing him for the past several days. Throughout the assessment he is fully oriented to time, place, and person, answers every question coherently, and describes his recent history in clear, accurate detail, despite the ongoing voices. What is this presentation?
Recognise · Hemiasomatognosia select
Hemiasomatognosia
Following a right parietal lesion, a man simply fails to mention or attend to his left arm at all — when asked directly, he does not actively claim it belongs to someone else, he just seems to have lost the felt sense that it is part of him and rarely refers to it. What is this?
Recognise · Hemispatial Neglect select
Hemispatial Neglect
Following a right parietal stroke, a patient consistently fails to notice food on the left side of her plate, does not respond to people or objects approaching from her left, and only draws the right half of a clock face when asked, despite intact vision and movement on that side. What is this?
Recognise · Histrionic Personality Disorder select
Histrionic Personality Disorder
A 34-year-old woman describes an ordinary work disagreement in highly theatrical, hyperbolic terms, dressed strikingly for the appointment, and repeatedly steers the conversation back toward whether you find her impressive. On closer contact her initial charm proves mixed with flirtatiousness and a degree of manipulativeness, and she becomes visibly upset when you glance at your notes rather than at her. What personality pattern is this?
Recognise · Hyperamnesia select
Hyperamnesia
A patient recalls the day of a serious accident in extraordinarily vivid, almost hallucinatory detail, describing sounds, smells, and images with striking intensity; on checking, her account matches the documented facts closely. What is this?
Recognise · Hypnagogic Hallucination select
Hypnagogic Hallucination
As a healthy young woman with no psychiatric history is falling asleep one night, she briefly and vividly hears her name being called, lasting only a few seconds before it passes and does not recur once she is either fully asleep or awake again. What is this?
Recognise · Hysterical Twilight State select
Hysterical Twilight State
Following a severe, unresolved argument with her family, a woman is found wandering many miles from home, with only a hazy awareness of recent events and, when asked, unable to say who she is. No organic cause is found on investigation, and the episode arose in the context of clear, severe psychological conflict. What is this presentation called?
Recognise · Illusion select
Illusion
Walking through a dimly lit garden at dusk, a man briefly perceives a coat hanging on a hook as a person standing still — but on looking more closely, he immediately recognises it correctly as a coat. What is this?
Recognise · Impulsive Behaviour select
Impulsive Behaviour
Without any warning or apparent reason, a catatonic patient suddenly strikes a fellow patient, and afterward is unable to give any explanation for why he did it. What is this?
Recognise · Impulsive Personality Disorder select
Impulsive Personality Disorder
A man describes a lifelong pattern, since his teenage years, of explosive outbursts triggered by minor provocations, with little thought of consequences beforehand and genuine remorse afterward once the anger passes. What is this?
Recognise · Incongruity of Affect select
Incongruity of Affect
Describing the recent death of her father, a 26-year-old woman giggles intermittently throughout the account. When her clinician gently notes the mismatch, she appears genuinely puzzled rather than embarrassed or self-conscious about it. What is this?
Recognise · Inhibition (Slowing) of Thinking select
Inhibition (Slowing) of Thinking
A depressed patient describes his thoughts as coming slowly and with effort, complaining of a mental fog that makes it hard to concentrate or make even small decisions, a pace that has gradually worsened over weeks. What is this?
Recognise · Intermediate Aphasia select
Intermediate Aphasia
A patient's aphasic language disturbance is difficult to place cleanly into either a purely receptive or purely expressive category; assessment reveals a specific, more circumscribed pattern rather than a global disturbance, though exactly which of two recognised specific sub-types best fits requires further, more detailed testing to establish. What broader category does this fall under?
Recognise · Involuntary Neurological Movement Signs select
Involuntary Neurological Movement Signs
A patient with a family history of Huntington's disease develops abrupt, coarse, dance-like jerking movements affecting his limbs and face, worsened whenever he becomes anxious. What is this?
Recognise · Irritability select
Irritability
Over recent weeks, a patient has become persistently quick to anger at minor, everyday provocations that would not normally trouble him, a change clearly noticed by his family as being unlike his usual, easy-going temperament, though he retains full control over his reactions. What is this?
Recognise · Lability of Affect select
Lability of Affect
During a single ten-minute conversation, a man moves abruptly from tearfulness to laughter to irritability and back again, each shift more pronounced than anything in the conversation seems to warrant. What is this pattern called?
Recognise · Lethologia select
Lethologia
A person briefly cannot recall the name of a familiar acquaintance during a conversation, experiencing a strong sense that the name is known and almost within reach, before it resolves on its own moments later with no lasting difficulty. What is this?
Recognise · Loss of Emotional Resonance select
Loss of Emotional Resonance
A depressed man describes, with visible distress, that when his children greet him he feels absolutely nothing — no warmth, no connection — despite still outwardly smiling and responding to them appropriately. To an observer he seems to react normally, but subjectively he feels a troubling inner absence. What is this?
Recognise · Lowering of Consciousness select
Lowering of Consciousness
Two weeks after a stroke, an 80-year-old woman appears profoundly slowed and apathetic, giving only brief, unclear answers and occasionally repeating the same word. She has no hallucinations, illusions, or agitation, prompting concern about severe dementia. Six weeks later she has regained much of her clarity, left with only a mild residual word-finding difficulty. What was this presentation most likely to have been?
Recognise · Mannerisms select
Mannerisms
A 30-year-old man with schizophrenia has a distinctive, exaggerated flourish every time he signs his name, sweeping his hand in a wide unnecessary arc before setting pen to paper. His family confirms this habit has been present, unchanged, for several years, and he cannot explain it when asked. What is this?
Recognise · Cooperation (Mitmachen) and Mitgehen select
Cooperation (Mitmachen) and Mitgehen
Despite being explicitly instructed to resist, a patient's arm can be moved into any position with no resistance at all, and immediately returns to its original resting position as soon as the examiner lets go. What is this?
Recognise · Morbid Anxiety select
Morbid Anxiety
A patient describes a pervasive, sustained state of anxiety present most of the time for months, persisting regardless of what is actually happening in her life, and significantly impairing her ability to work or socialise. What is this?
Recognise · Morbid Disorder of Emotion select
Morbid Disorder of Emotion
A patient has experienced a low, hopeless mood every day for the past four months that has not lifted regardless of positive events, alongside sleep disturbance and loss of interest in previously enjoyed activities; her facial expressions and manner of showing emotion remain entirely normal throughout. What level of disturbed emotion does this represent?
Recognise · Morbid Euphoria select
Morbid Euphoria
A man with bipolar affective disorder has, for the past two weeks, been persistently and infectiously cheerful and optimistic, convinced everything in his life is going brilliantly despite recently losing his job, and has begun making a series of large, risky financial commitments as a result. What is this?
Recognise · Morbid Expression of Emotion select
Morbid Expression of Emotion
A patient's face has become noticeably flat and his voice monotone over recent months, changes his wife brought to the clinician's attention; when asked directly, the patient insists nothing about how he shows his feelings has changed at all. What is this?
Recognise · Moria select
Moria
Following a frontal lobe injury, a man persistently makes jokes and puns regardless of the seriousness of the conversation, seemingly unable to engage with a topic for long without lapsing into facetious remarks that feel shallow and hollow rather than genuinely witty or warm. What is this?
Recognise · Motor and Verbal Perseveration select
Motor and Verbal Perseveration
After being asked to put her tongue out and told "thank you, that's enough," a patient continues moving her tongue in and out for several more seconds before stopping, seemingly unable to move straight on to the next instruction. What is this?
Recognise · Experience of Multiple Personalities select
Experience of Multiple Personalities
A patient describes, and appears genuinely to experience, having several entirely distinct personalities, each with its own name, manner, and way of relating to the world, rather than simply feeling like a changed or different version of herself. What is this?
Recognise · Munchausen's Syndrome select
Munchausen's Syndrome
A man has presented to more than a dozen hospitals across the country, each time with a dramatic, well-rehearsed account of a medical emergency, and bears multiple surgical scars from procedures sought under false pretences. What is this?
Recognise · Mutism select
Mutism
A patient produces no spoken speech at all over several days of observation, despite being otherwise physically capable of speaking, and communicates instead only through gesture and occasional handwritten notes. What is this?
Recognise · Narcissistic Personality Disorder select
Narcissistic Personality Disorder
A 45-year-old executive describes his recent promotion as "the company finally recognising what everyone already knew," becomes coldly dismissive toward a colleague after a project's success is credited to the whole team rather than to him alone, and redirects a conversation about his partner's difficult week back to his own achievements within moments. What is this presentation most consistent with?
Recognise · Negativism select
Negativism
A patient resists every attempt to move his arm, and when asked to open his eyes he instead screws them shut more tightly, and when asked to shake hands he pulls his hand away — always doing the precise opposite of what is requested, apparently for no discernible reason. What is this?
Recognise · Neologism select
Neologism
A patient with a longstanding psychotic illness repeatedly uses the word 'plimtosis' to describe a private, hard-to-put-into-words inner experience, using it consistently across several conversations. When asked, he offers an explanation of what he means by it, though the word itself is not a real one. What is this?
Recognise · Nihilistic Delusion select
Nihilistic Delusion
A severely depressed patient states, with complete and unshakeable conviction, that his bowels have rotted away and no longer exist, holding this as literal fact despite obvious evidence to the contrary, and shows no insight that this could be a subjective feeling rather than a genuine physical absence. What is this?
Recognise · Nominal Aphasia select
Nominal Aphasia
A patient speaks in grammatically correct, fluent sentences but repeatedly cannot find the name of common objects shown to him, instead describing what each one is used for; his comprehension and grammar are otherwise entirely intact. What is this?
Recognise · Obsession select
Obsession
A man is troubled by repeated, unwanted images of harming his own child, which he finds horrifying and completely contrary to how he actually feels. He recognises the thoughts as arising from his own mind, tries hard to resist them, and is acutely aware that they are excessive and irrational, which itself causes him great distress and guilt. What is this?
Recognise · Obstruction (Blocking) select
Obstruction (Blocking)
A patient begins to reach for a cup, stops abruptly partway through the movement for no apparent reason, and then completes the action with no difficulty a few moments later, this pattern occurring unpredictably across several different actions during the interview. What is this?
Recognise · Occupational Delirium select
Occupational Delirium
A confused, disoriented patient in hospital, a retired carpenter, is observed repeatedly making sawing and hammering motions in the air with his hands, actions his family immediately recognise from his decades of trade work, though he is not actually holding any tools. What is this?
Recognise · Olfactory Hallucination select
Olfactory Hallucination
A patient repeatedly reports smelling burning rubber, on and off over several days, though no one else in the room notices anything and no source can be found on careful checking of the environment. What is this?
Recognise · Organic Amnesia select
Organic Amnesia
Following a significant head injury with confirmed structural brain damage, a patient has a persisting, severe difficulty forming new memories, while her sense of who she is and her social behaviour remain essentially intact and recognisable to those who know her. What is this?
Recognise · Organic Hallucination select
Organic Hallucination
A patient who lost his left arm in an accident several years ago describes ongoing, sometimes painful sensations that feel as though they are coming from the missing limb. What is this?
Recognise · Overvalued Idea select
Overvalued Idea
For several years, a man has held a single, dominating belief that he was wrongly dismissed from a job, a belief with a plausible basis in reality, held with strong conviction, though he is somewhat more willing than most to discuss and consider other perspectives on it than a typical fixed false belief would allow. What is this?
Recognise · Panic Attack select
Panic Attack
While sitting quietly at home with nothing in particular happening, a woman is suddenly overwhelmed by intense fear, her heart pounding, chest tight, and short of breath, convinced for several minutes that she might be dying, before the whole episode subsides within half an hour. What is this?
Recognise · Paramnesia (Distortion of Memory) select
Paramnesia (Distortion of Memory)
A patient's memory of a past holiday is present and can be recounted in detail, but on closer examination is found to be altered, with an incorrect sense of unfamiliarity about parts of it that genuinely happened. Nothing is simply missing — the memory exists, just distorted. What general category of memory disturbance is this?
Recognise · Paranoid Personality Disorder select
Paranoid Personality Disorder
A woman has for many years been quick to take offence, consistently assumes colleagues and even her own husband are acting against her interests without good evidence, and has become increasingly isolated as friends have drifted away from her persistent suspicion, though she remains able, if pressed, to consider that she might be wrong. What does this represent?
Recognise · Paraphasia select
Paraphasia
Following a confirmed stroke affecting a specific language area, a patient repeatedly says "the spoon" when trying to name a fork, alongside other clear signs of word-finding difficulty and disturbed grammar, but with no evidence of psychotic thought content. What is this?
Recognise · Paraschemazia select
Paraschemazia
A patient insists that her left arm now has an extra joint partway along the forearm, and describes feeling as though a small, unreal extra structure is attached to it, while recognising this cannot really be true. What is this?
Recognise · Passivity Phenomena select
Passivity Phenomena
A man states, with complete conviction, that his own arm movements are not made by him but are directly controlled by a device implanted by a government agency, and that the fear he feels is likewise put into him by the same device rather than being his own feeling. What is this?
Recognise · Pathological Drunkenness select
Pathological Drunkenness
After drinking a single small glass of wine, a man with no history of violence becomes suddenly and senselessly violent toward those around him for about an hour, shows none of the usual unsteadiness or slurred speech of drunkenness, and afterward has no memory whatsoever of the episode. What is this?
Recognise · Perplexity select
Perplexity
A patient in the early stages of an acute psychotic episode appears outwardly bewildered and hesitant, repeatedly saying she cannot make sense of what is happening around her or of her own thoughts, though she remains fully alert and correctly oriented to time, place, and person. What is this?
Recognise · Perseveration select
Perseveration
Asked to name the current prime minister, a patient with known brain disease answers correctly. Asked next what day of the week it is, he repeats the prime minister's name instead. He seems to notice something is wrong and tries again, with limited success. What is this?
Recognise · Perseveration of Posture select
Perseveration of Posture
An examiner passively moves a patient's arm into an unusual, uncomfortable raised position; there is no resistance felt during the movement itself, but when the examiner releases the arm, the patient's muscles can be felt to contract and actively hold the arm in that position for several minutes. What is this?
Recognise · Personality Disorder select
Personality Disorder
A woman has shown a consistent, deeply ingrained pattern of certain emotional and behavioural traits since her teenage years, continuing unchanged into her forties, and these traits have caused persistent, significant difficulty in her relationships throughout that time, independent of any distinct episode of illness. What general category does this represent?
Recognise · Phobia select
Phobia
A patient experiences intense fear only when near dogs, consistently and specifically, recognises that her reaction is excessive given that the dogs in question are calm and on leads, and has begun taking long detours to avoid streets where she might encounter one. What is this?
Recognise · Primary Delusion select
Primary Delusion
A man suddenly becomes convinced, with no preceding change in mood, no hallucination, and no prior belief it could plausibly have grown from, that he is the reincarnation of a historical king. The conviction simply appears, fully formed, as something entirely new in his mental life. What kind of delusion is this?
Recognise · Pseudohallucination select
Pseudohallucination
A 58-year-old widow says, "About a month after my husband died, I'd see him sitting in his armchair in the evenings. I always knew it wasn't really him — it was more like seeing a very clear picture in my head that happened to be laid over the chair." She has no other symptoms and is coping well with her grief. What is this experience?
Recognise · Pseudologia Fantastica select
Pseudologia Fantastica
Facing upcoming legal proceedings, a man with no evidence of any brain disease begins telling elaborate, fluent, and increasingly grandiose stories about a secret career as a decorated intelligence officer, seeming genuinely caught up in these accounts, but eventually admits the truth when confronted with clear documentary proof that none of it happened. What is this?
Recognise · Psychomotor Retardation select
Psychomotor Retardation
A 60-year-old man with severe depressive illness takes noticeably long pauses before answering even simple questions, moves slowly and with little spontaneous gesture, and describes feeling as though he is "moving through treacle." What is this?
Recognise · Pure Word Deafness select
Pure Word Deafness
A patient can hear that people are speaking and recognises other environmental sounds normally, but cannot understand a single spoken word said to him, though his reading and writing remain completely unaffected. What is this?
Recognise · Pure Word-Dumbness select
Pure Word-Dumbness
A patient is entirely unable to speak, spontaneously or on request, yet writes fluent, grammatically correct, and entirely appropriate answers to every question asked of him in writing. What is this?
Recognise · Disorders of Reactive Movements select
Disorders of Reactive Movements
A catatonic patient shows a general, stiff unresponsiveness, failing to flinch at a sudden loud noise or turn toward unexpected movement nearby, without any sense that she is deliberately resisting or refusing anything in particular. What is this?
Recognise · Reactivity of Mood select
Reactivity of Mood
A patient's mood brightens noticeably within minutes of a friend visiting with good news, only to drop sharply again when a minor inconvenience occurs shortly afterward, with this pattern of marked responsiveness to circumstances recurring throughout the day. What is this?
Recognise · Receptive Aphasia select
Receptive Aphasia
A patient speaks fluently and without apparent effort, but the words he produces are often unrelated to any question asked, and he shows no sign of understanding spoken or written instructions given to him. What is this?
Recognise · Reflex Hallucination select
Reflex Hallucination
Every time a patient hears a car door slam nearby, she reliably and reproducibly experiences a full, vivid visual hallucination of a figure in the corner of the room, distressing and unbidden each time. What is this?
Recognise · Restriction of Consciousness select
Restriction of Consciousness
A patient appears only slightly bemused, with awareness narrowed to a small number of preoccupying ideas, disoriented for time and place, yet still able to wander about the ward in a relatively well-ordered way despite being unable to look after herself. What is this?
Recognise · Retrograde Amnesia select
Retrograde Amnesia
A 26-year-old man is brought to hospital after a motorcycle accident with a brief loss of consciousness. Once he is alert again, he can lay down new memories normally, but he cannot recall anything from the twenty minutes immediately before the crash, and over the following days that gap gradually shrinks to only the last minute or two before impact. What is this?
Recognise · Retrospective Delusion select
Retrospective Delusion
A patient with a well-documented two-year history of a persecutory delusion insists, despite clear evidence of a recent onset, that people have "always" been plotting against her, reshaping her account of her entire childhood to fit this belief. What is this?
Recognise · Retrospective Falsification select
Retrospective Falsification
A patient in a depressed mood recalls an entire period of her life as an unbroken run of failure, having genuinely forgotten or downplayed the real successes that were also part of that time. What is this?
Recognise · Ribot's Law of Memory Regression select
Ribot's Law of Memory Regression
Over several years of progressive brain disease, a patient gradually loses track of what happened even a week ago, while continuing to describe events from his childhood in vivid, accurate detail, with the gap between recent and remote memory widening steadily as the illness advances. What is this?
Recognise · Running Commentary Voices select
Running Commentary Voices
A man reports hearing two voices, speaking to each other about him in the third person, describing his actions as he performs them in real time: 'he's picking up the cup now... he's putting it down again.' What is this?
Recognise · Schemazia Distortion select
Schemazia Distortion
A patient reports that her right leg suddenly feels enormous, several times its actual size, though she knows objectively that it looks and measures the same as always. What is this?
Recognise · Schizoid Personality Disorder select
Schizoid Personality Disorder
A man describes a lifelong pattern of emotional coolness and detachment from others, with little genuine wish for close relationships, taking real enjoyment instead from solitary intellectual pursuits, and appearing entirely content with this way of life rather than distressed by it. What is this?
Recognise · Schizophasia select
Schizophasia
A patient with chronic schizophrenia produces speech so profoundly confused and disorganised that it is largely impossible to follow, yet she is still able to carry out simple practical tasks around the ward competently, with no history of stroke or other focal neurological event. What is this?
Recognise · Schizotypal Personality Disorder select
Schizotypal Personality Disorder
A longstanding pattern of social oddness is described in a patient who has a small number of relationships he does genuinely value, but who experiences fluctuating episodes of feeling detached from the world, holds several odd beliefs that fall short of true delusions, and shows unusual, eccentric ways of communicating with others. What is this?
Recognise · Screen Memory select
Screen Memory
A woman recalls a childhood memory of being comforted by her mother after a fall, but careful, gradual exploration later establishes that while the fall genuinely happened, it was in fact her father, not her mother, who was present and whose role in the memory has been substituted, apparently protecting her from a more painful truth about that day. What is this kind of memory called?
Recognise · Secondary Delusion select
Secondary Delusion
A man with profound, established depressive illness comes to believe, arising directly out of his overwhelming sense of worthlessness, that he has committed unforgivable sins and deserves severe punishment — a belief that developed gradually and can be clearly traced back to, and understood in light of, his underlying depressed mood. What kind of delusion is this?
Recognise · Sense of Presence select
Sense of Presence
Following the death of her husband, a woman describes a clear, specific feeling that someone is standing just behind her — she cannot say she has seen, heard, or felt anything in particular, only that she is certain someone is there. What is this experience?
Recognise · Sensory Intensity Distortion select
Sensory Intensity Distortion
During a period of high anxiety, a patient reports that ordinary background sounds have started to feel painfully loud, though he can correctly identify every sound and knows exactly what is producing it. What is this?
Recognise · Smiling Depression select
Smiling Depression
A man maintains a sociable, cheerful manner throughout a consultation, explaining he does not want to burden his family, yet on careful, direct questioning discloses profound hopelessness, loss of interest in everything, and significant suicidal thinking that his outward presentation gave no hint of. What is this?
Recognise · Somatisation select
Somatisation
A patient with depressive illness repeatedly presents to her doctor with persistent fatigue, vague abdominal pain, and headaches, insisting these physical symptoms are her only concern; only on specific, direct questioning about her mood does significant sadness and loss of interest become apparent. What is this?
Recognise · Somatoparaphrenia select
Somatoparaphrenia
Following a right hemisphere stroke, a woman has left-sided paralysis and sensory loss. She acknowledges that the arm lying beside her cannot move, but insists with complete conviction that it is not her own arm — she says it belongs to the nurse and was left there by mistake. What is this?
Recognise · Stammering and Stuttering select
Stammering and Stuttering
Under significant stress, a man's speech becomes broken by pauses and by repetition of parts of words, accompanied by visible grimacing, a difficulty he had as a child but which had resolved years ago. What is this?
Recognise · Stereotyped Posture select
Stereotyped Posture
A patient spontaneously adopts and rigidly holds his head a few inches above the pillow for hours at a time, with no prompting or passive manipulation by anyone else. What is this?
Recognise · Stiffening of Affect select
Stiffening of Affect
Throughout a lengthy interview covering many different topics, a patient's expression remains fixed in an intense, suspicious wariness that never shifts, even when the conversation moves to neutral or pleasant subjects that would ordinarily change how someone looks. What is this?
Recognise · Stupor select
Stupor
A patient lies motionless, gives no response to being spoken to or touched, and produces no speech at all beyond, on rare occasions, a brief, barely audible monosyllable. Consciousness, judged from other clinical evidence, appears essentially clear. What is this?
Recognise · Synaesthesia select
Synaesthesia
Since childhood, a person has reliably experienced a distinct colour whenever hearing a particular musical note, this pairing being stable, automatic, and lifelong, occurring only when the actual sound is genuinely present, with no history of psychiatric illness. What is this?
Recognise · Tactile Hallucination select
Tactile Hallucination
A patient describes a vivid, persistent sensation of insects crawling under the skin of both forearms, prompting frequent scratching, in the context of recent heavy stimulant use. No skin lesions or rash are found on examination. What is this?
Recognise · Talking Past the Point (Vorbeireden) select
Talking Past the Point (Vorbeireden)
Asked the colour of grass, a patient answers "white." Asked the colour of snow, he answers "green." His answers are coherent, grammatically intact, and clearly related to each question, showing he has understood perfectly well. What is this?
Recognise · Tardive Dyskinesia select
Tardive Dyskinesia
After several years of antipsychotic treatment, a patient develops repetitive, purposeless movements of the mouth, tongue, and face, with a gradual onset that developed slowly over time rather than suddenly. What is this?
Recognise · Thought Alienation select
Thought Alienation
A man describes, across several different experiences, a general loss of the ordinary sense that his thoughts belong exclusively to him — sometimes they are placed into his mind, sometimes taken out, sometimes made accessible to others. What is the general term for this family of experiences?
Recognise · Thought Blocking select
Thought Blocking
A 27-year-old man is mid-sentence describing his week when he suddenly stops, stares blankly for a few seconds, and says he has completely lost his train of thought and cannot recall what he was about to say. There was no obvious distraction. He says this has been happening several times a day for the past two weeks. What is this?
Recognise · Thought Broadcasting select
Thought Broadcasting
A patient describes, with obvious distress, that as he thinks something, people around him somehow know exactly what he is thinking at that moment — as though his thoughts are no longer confined to his own head and are somehow accessible to others. He denies that anyone is putting thoughts into his mind or taking them away. What is this?
Recognise · Thought Echo select
Thought Echo
A patient reports that, as soon as she thinks something, she hears her own thought spoken aloud by a voice, word for word, a moment later — she recognises the words as her own thought, but experiences the voice as external and real, not as her own inner speech. What is this?
Recognise · Thought Insertion select
Thought Insertion
A man tells you, with complete conviction, that when certain thoughts appear in his mind they are not his own — someone else has put them there. He can describe the exact sensation of a thought being placed into his head, and insists these thoughts feel foreign from the moment they arrive, not merely unwelcome. What is this?
Recognise · Thought Withdrawal select
Thought Withdrawal
A patient describes that, mid-thought, his thinking suddenly and completely vanishes, and he is certain this happened because an outside force actively took the thought out of his mind, rather than him simply losing his train of thought. What is this?
Recognise · Distortion of the Experience of Time select
Distortion of the Experience of Time
During a period of severe low mood, a 47-year-old woman describes each afternoon feeling as though it lasts an entire day, remarking that she has repeatedly checked the clock certain that hours must have passed, only to find that mere minutes have gone by. When asked directly, she correctly states the date and time. What is this presentation?
Recognise · Trailing Phenomena select
Trailing Phenomena
During a period of hallucinogenic drug intoxication, a patient watches a real hand moving smoothly across his field of view, but instead of seeing continuous motion, he perceives a series of separate, discontinuous images of the hand strung out behind it, though he correctly identifies it as a hand throughout. What is this?
Recognise · Transitory Thinking select
Transitory Thinking
A patient's sentence begins clearly on the topic of his medication, but partway through, without any explanation or connecting logic, the sentence structure breaks down and finishes on an entirely unrelated topic, with grammar disrupted in the process. What is this?
Recognise · Twilight State select
Twilight State
A man with epilepsy is witnessed to wander from his workplace, behaving in a relatively well-ordered way throughout, before returning to full awareness twenty minutes later with no memory of the episode at all — a clean break rather than a gradual return. What is this presentation called?
Recognise · Undirected Fantasy Thinking select
Undirected Fantasy Thinking
A lonely teenager spends long stretches of time each day absorbed in an elaborate, private daydream in which she is a celebrated adventurer, readily acknowledging when asked that it is simply imagination and a welcome escape from a difficult home life, not something she believes is actually happening. What is this?
Recognise · Verbal Stereotypy select
Verbal Stereotypy
Throughout a lengthy interview, a patient repeatedly says "the wheels are turning" — inserting the phrase after answers to entirely unrelated questions about his mood, his sleep, and his family, with no evident connection to any of them. What is this?
Recognise · Verbigeration select
Verbigeration
For several minutes, unprompted, a patient continuously repeats the sentence "I want to go home now, I want to go home now" in a flat, monotonous tone, seemingly regardless of anything said to her in the meantime. What is this?
Recognise · Visceral Hallucination select
Visceral Hallucination
A patient describes a persistent sensation that her stomach "has stopped working and is rotting inside her," with a sense of pulling and burning deep in her abdomen, in the absence of any positive findings on thorough medical investigation. What is this?
Recognise · Visual Asymbolia select
Visual Asymbolia
A patient cannot read words aloud or recognise them visually, though he understands the same words perfectly well when they are read to him, and he is still able to copy the written words onto a fresh sheet of paper even though he cannot read what he has copied. What is this?
Recognise · Visual Hallucination select
Visual Hallucination
A patient with a fluctuating level of alertness reports seeing small, fully detailed figures of people moving about in the corner of the room, describing them with the same conviction and sense of reality as any object actually present, alongside intermittent disorientation to time and place. What is this?
Recognise · Waxy Flexibility select
Waxy Flexibility
An examiner gently raises a catatonic patient's arm into an unusual, awkward position; the arm moves with a smooth, even resistance throughout, similar to bending a soft wax rod, and then remains held in that exact position for several minutes without the patient appearing to actively resist. What is this?