Many people who have had COVID realize that their symptoms do not always go away, and sometimes they even change. From gastrointestinal problems to brain fog, there is a long list of strange complications that can result from the virus. Experts are now warning about another frightening effect of the coronavirus affecting younger patients and even those with mild cases. Doctors found it some COVID patients develop severe psychotic symptoms without having had a mental illness before the virus.
In a new feature in the The New York Times, physicians describe cases of patients experiencing psychotic symptoms after their recovery from COVID, including hearing of voices, paranoia, delusions, suicidal thoughts, hallucinations, and violence. For more information on these frightening effects of COVID, read on, and for more long-term symptoms, check out the “Really Disruptive” long COVID symptoms that doctors want you to be prepared for.
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Even patients with mild COVID symptoms develop psychosis.
Many of the patients who developed these symptoms had very minimal COVID symptoms during the disease. Psychiatrist Hisam Goueli, Managing Director, tells The times that the patients he treated with psychosis did not experience any respiratory complications, but did have subtle neurological symptoms such as tingling in the hand, dizziness, headache or a loss of smell.
Goueli said patients from two weeks to a few months later ‘develop this profound psychosis, which is really dangerous and scary for all the people around them’.
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Psychosis after COVID is more common in people aged 30 to 50 years.
The New York Times reports that COVID patients who show psychotic symptoms tend to be in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, which is usually an unusual time to develop psychosis. Goueli said the symptoms he saw more frequently coincided with schizophrenia in young people or dementia in older people.
He also points out that many patients are aware of their own psychosis, which is abnormal. “People with psychosis usually do not have the insight that they have lost touch with reality,” Goueli said.
To learn about another strange COVID symptom, going to this strange symptom is the only sign that you have COVID, study says.
Yet the development of psychosis after COVID is quite rare.
Although patients who develop severe psychiatric symptoms after recovering from COVID are not as common, they do show the extent of the kind of devastation that the virus can cause on the body. An October study published in the journal The Lancet Psychiatry evidence found that approximately 7 percent of COVID patients with psychiatric complications – 10 out of 150 – experience ‘new psychosis’.
In addition to severe psychotic symptoms, COVID is also known to have other psychological effects, including depression and anxiety. A November study was also published in The Lancet Psychiatry found that COVID patients “have an increased risk of psychiatric consequences, and a psychiatric diagnosis may be an independent risk factor for COVID-19.”
To check if you have this coronavirus symptom, check If you have this symptom, there is an 80 percent chance that you have COVID.
Experts think it is due to inflammation.
Although experts have yet to identify the cause of the psychotic symptoms after COVID, they assume that it is the result of inflammation or the body’s immune response to the virus. “Some of the neurotoxins that are responses to immune activation can go to the brain through the blood-brain barrier and can cause this damage.” Vilma Gabbay, MD, co-director of the Psychiatry Research Institute in Montefiore Einstein, tells The times.
Or you tend to develop psychotic symptoms.
According to The times’ reporting, experts suggest that some patients may develop psychosis due to their genetic makeup or an unmarked predisposition to mental illness. Brian Kincaid, MD, medical director of emergency psychiatric services at Duke, said a patient he saw developing psychosis also once had a skin reaction to another virus. Kincaid tells The times that it may indicate that the patient’s immune system is overexpressing when responding to viral infections.
Psychotic symptoms have also occurred with other viruses.
Although psychotic symptoms may seem like a strange complication of a virus, they have never been. Jonathan Alpert, Managing Director, Chair of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, tells The times that he and his colleagues think “that it is not unique to COVID.”
A February article published in the magazine Boundaries in psychiatry back up this idea. The researchers compiled information on psychosis documented during multiple pandemics, from the 1918 flu to the 2009 swine flu. “A link between flu infection and psychosis has been reported since the eighteenth century,” the authors wrote. “It is important to emphasize that infection is associated with an increased risk for various psychiatric disorders.”
To see if you have this subtle sign of coronavirus, look at This Is One Of The Most “Easy Overlooked” COVID Symptoms, experts warn.