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0:00
Hello, My name is
Robert McCutcheon
and I'm a Psychiatrist
and a Researcher.
In both my clinical
and my academic work,
I'm really interested in
the cognitive
symptoms of psychosis
and that's what I'm going
to be talking about today.
0:22
I'm going to start by
really discussing
what the problem is.
Then I'm going to discuss
how this problem arises.
What are the causative factors
beneath cognitive
impairment in psychosis?
Then finally, I'm going to think
about how we go around
addressing this.
What are the potential
clinical interventions that
we can make to treat cognitive
symptoms in psychosis?
0:53
Why is it worth
thinking about this?
First of all, it's
highly prevalent.
The graph shows
a distribution of
cognitive scores.
You can see the control
population in blue
and the people with
schizophrenia in orange.
You can see that there's really
a quite profound shift
in the performance
on cognitive tests compared to
the control population.
Of course, if it was
highly prevalent but
of no consequence,
we wouldn't mind that much.
The reason we mind is because it
has a really major
impact on functioning.
Cognitive symptoms
are really one of
the main reasons why
people with psychosis
aren't able to reach
their full potential,
and contributes to
unemployment and
inability to live independently.
The other reason is because
we don't currently have
good treatments for this.
The standard dopamine-blocking
agents we use
are effective for
hallucinations and delusions
but really don't
have much benefit,
and can at times even be harmful
when it comes to
cognitive symptoms.
