I’m really curious. What’s the difference between major depressive disorder with psychosis and schizoaffective disorder depressive type? At 14 I was diagnosed MDD with psychosis and now at 20 they re diagnosed me with schizoaffective disorder depressive type. I think they changed the dx because my psychotic symptoms remained the same through my different depressive episodes and it wasn’t directly related to my depression. Does anyone have any insight?
If you have MDD with psychosis you experience psychotic symptoms only during depressive episodes. If you recover from the depressive episode the psychosis goes away, too.
Schizoaffective/depressive-type, you can have psychosis any time, depressed or not.
That’s my understanding of it, anyway.
2 Likes
At the time of my first psychotic break I was diagnosed bipolar I with psychotic features, then it later was changed to schizoaffective, bipolar-type.
By definition there is a difference: more symptoms.
For a diagnosis of schizoaffective disorder, one needs to have symptoms consistent with schizophrenia at one point as well as bipolar disorder at a different point in the same episode of illness. This can be tough to sort out unless you are seeing the same physician throughout the whole time.
The DSM is not super helpful about this area. Ultimately there is a lot of overlap of symptoms across psychotic disorders, which makes it extremely confusing to diagnose a person with psychosis and mood symptoms.
The difference between these two is which symptoms are the primary set. In schizoaffective, mood symptoms are only present when typical symptoms of schizophrenia are present, although schizophrenia symptoms may be present without mood symptoms. In mood disorder with psychotic features, mood symptoms are primary. To my knowledge there isn’t so much an emphasis on psychotic symptoms only being present during mood symptoms, but typically this is diagnosed when mood symptoms become so severe over time that a person becomes psychotic (either during a depressive or manic episode).
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed 95 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.