Research has led to the discovery of cases of severe psychosis associated with coronavirus.
A Los Angeles patient caring for COVID-19 also suffered from a severe mental disorder.
“We currently have a patient who is being treated for COVID. And while being treated for COVID, he has a psychosis and he came up with beliefs that are completely bizarrely abnormal,” said Keck Medicine of the USC psychiatrist, dr. Steven Siegel, said.
Siegel explained that people with psychosis experience thoughts and emotions so weakened that they lose contact with reality.
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“People believe that the police are after them or that their families are trying to hurt them,” he said.
Individual reports of coronavirus-related psychosis have been documented in medical journals. Some experts suspect the cause may be that the body’s immune system is reacting or inflammation caused by the disease.
Dr. Charles Casassa is a neurologist at Loma Linda University Health.
“We see symptoms related to encephalitis, which can include confusion and rarely psychosis,” he said.
Casassa studies the effects of COVID-19 on patients with epilepsy and finds that the virus can cause more seizures.
“We also found that there are patients who have had no seizures before, who can have seizures later once they are infected with COVID,” he said.
Research on how COVID-19 affects the brain is still in its early days. How long the psychosis episodes can last and who is vulnerable are all questions that need to be answered. Siegel says, however, that people should keep in mind that the condition is very rare.
“It’s much more the extreme. An extreme rarity than something I think people need to spend their energy on,” Siegel said. “It probably won’t happen.”
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