Brain scans, spinal fluid analyzes and other tests found no brain infection, says Dr. Gabbay, whose hospital treated two patients with post-Covid psychosis: a 49-year-old man who heard voices believing he was the devil and a 34-year-old woman who started carrying a knife in front of strangers uprooted and put hand disinfection in her food.
Physically, most of these patients did not become very ill from Covid-19. The patients who dr. Goueli treated had no breathing problems, but did have subtle neurological symptoms such as tingling in the hand, dizziness, headache or decreased odor. Then, two weeks to a few months later, he said, “they are developing this profound psychosis, which is really dangerous and scary for all the people around them.”
Also striking is that most patients were in their thirties, forties and fifties. “It is very rare that you develop this type of psychosis in this age group,” said Dr. Goueli said, as such symptoms are usually accompanied by schizophrenia in adolescents or dementia in older patients. And some patients – like the physiotherapist who took herself to the hospital – understood that something was wrong, while ‘people with psychosis usually do not have the insight that they have lost touch with reality’.
Some post-Covid patients who developed psychosis needed weeks of hospitalization in which doctors tried different medications before finding one that helped.
Dr. Robert Yolken, an expert in neurovirology at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, said that although people recover physically from Covid-19, in some cases their immune systems may not be able to shut down, or that they may remain engaged. due to “delayed clearance of a small amount of virus.”
Persistent immune activation is also a leading explanation for brain fog and memory problems that plagued many Covid survivors, and Emily Severance, a Johns Hopkins schizophrenia expert, said Covid’s cognitive and psychiatric effects may stem from ‘something similar in the brain happens’.