Mosby's Canadian Practical Nurse (PN) Practice Test

Psychosis is a state in which a person loses touch with reality, with thoughts, perceptions, or beliefs that are markedly distorted relative to what others experience. This loss of reality testing leads to symptoms such as delusions (fixed, false beliefs) and hallucinations (perceiving things that aren’t there), and can be accompanied by disorganized thinking and impaired judgment. Because of this fundamental disruption in distinguishing what is real from what is not, describing psychosis as a psychological break from reality is the best-fit definition. It’s a broad description that can occur in various conditions (schizophrenia, mood disorders with psychotic features, substance-induced states, medical illnesses), and it’s distinct from delirium, which involves a disturbance of consciousness, or from viewing psychosis as simply another term for a single diagnosis.