Positive symptoms

Definition

Positive symptoms are thoughts, behaviors, or sensory perceptions present in a person with a mental disorder, but not present in people in the normal population.

Description

Examples of positive symptoms are hallucinations (seeing, hearing, or smelling things not really there), delusions (belief in ideas not based on reality), disorganized speech (loose association between ideas, derailment of sentences, incoherence, illogical statements, excessive detail, and rhyming of words), or bizarre behavior. In other disorders, positive symptoms are primarily associated with schizophrenia or psychosis.

See also Negative symptoms

Sandra L. Friedrich, M.A.