I’ve been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder twice now by two different doctors most recently, so I’m working on accepting this diagnosis. However I’m kind of confused because some people say it’s a mood disorder and some people say it’s a psychotic disorder. So I guess my question is, what’s the difference between the two?
P.S. I got out of the hospital yesterday and I feel much better.
Schizoaffective is a psychotic and a mood disorder.
Schizoaffective is both
all i can say is being schizoaffective is not great. mood up and down and in the middle all day. the high moods are nice though. plus there is psychosis and delusions still possible.
Is the psychosis induced by mania though with sza? I have just sz. They tried giving me lithium in the hospital and it really messed with me.
Sza has a mood disorder along side of the sz. With me it’s bipolar type and that really got figured out earlier this year.
With me i have the mania that happens more often than psychosis and depression less often. I’ve had two psychotic episodes but they don’t last nearly as long as mania or depression. Mania for me is shorter than depression and i get very creative (more than normal) but will have a lot of ideas and i’ll have ideas that don’t really fit with what i’m actually doing.
It’s complicated for sure. At first I was only diagnosed with sz.
Not necessarily because I was considered bipolar 1 even with hallucinations. It was when I mentioned hallucinations with no mania or depression that I was diagnosed sza.
Ah I see now. Thanks for sharing.
People already answered, but the way it was described to me, is that I have sz as well as bi-polar tendencies. Like for example one night I walked 26 miles overnight to the beach, through the mountains along a road, and wasn’t even tired when I got picked up by my family.
I guess there are different types of “affective” but from what little I know, bipolar type is the most common? I don’t know too many szA’s in real life. The one I do know is the same as me, with bipolar type. He gets more depressed though, where I get more manic.
szA is also the reason I don’t drink. My pdoc said a beer or two occasionally would be fine, but when I start drinking, my brain just says “MORE MORE MORE” and before you know it, I’m drunk and slightly psychotic. She says it’s from the bipolar portion, but that if I can limit myself to 1-2 beers I’ll be fine. I don’t feel it’s worth the risk.
Point being, szA can come with extra “issues” so to speak.
(To my understanding)
They’re similar. Both disorders have prominent distortions of reality, with hallucination, delusions, and problems with thought processes.
Officially, schizophrenia is a thought disorder characterized by psychosis which consists of hallucinations and/or delusions.
Schizoaffective disorder is when a person fulfills diagnostic criteria for a mood disorder plus has periods of psychosis during times when the mood disorder symptoms are not present. There are two types of schizoaffective, bipolar & depressed types.
Sza is both a thought disorder and a mood disorder. It is both.
I am schizoaffective and only very rarely drink alcohol. And I never do illegal drugs anymore. I used to smoke pot recreationally mostly on weekends. But nothing worse than that.
I imagine it can be hard to tease apart schizophrenia from schizoaffective from bipolar with psychotic features in a clinical setting but schizophrenia lacks any major mood symptoms and only has positive and negative symptoms, while bipolar with psychotic features is diagnosed when the psychosis is only during a mood episode, whereas with schizoaffective the mood and psychotic symptoms coexist but are independent of each other ie you have psychotic symptoms when not in a mood episode
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