Bulgarian Journal of Psychiatry, 2019; 4(2):15-19

PSYCHOPATHOLOGY IN CONTEMPORARY TIMES AND AFTERWARDS

Georgi Onchev

Department of Psychiatry and Medical Psychology, Medical University – Sofia

Abstract. The accelerated culture transition causes collective cognitive distortions and mentality alterations with “normal” psyche, thus problematizing its position as a referent for psychopathology. The contemporary mass post-truth landscape, virtual identities, and post-modern culture with its key topics such as fluidity, deconstruction, relativism, tolerance, over-permissiveness, secularity, alienation, and substitution of facts with opinions – all contribute to the cognitive insecurity, and even to difficult discrimination of ontological reality. The impact of these changes on psychopathology and mental health care include pathomorphosis of clinical pictures, extinction of some of the classical forms, blurring of the diagnostic boundaries, mimicry of psychopathology, low tolerance to anxiety, new identity disturbances, new manifestations of anxiety, psychosis and addictive behavior, as well as stigma dropping and overdiagnosis growth. The pattern of phenomenology in the future, along with the perspectives in mental health care and in the integrity of the psychiatric profession, are prognosticated.

Key words: psychopathology, post-modernity, culture, collective cognitive distortions, identity, pathomorphosis, psychosis, mimicry, overdiagnosis

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