Psychiatrists have been coming across a few COVID-19 patients with serious psychotic symptoms.
Seattle-based psychiatrist Dr. Hisam Goueli said he could immediately tell that patients who came to his hospital this summer were unusual.
He gave an example of a 42-year-old patient, a physical therapist and mother of four children, who had no psychiatric symptoms nor any family history of mental illness. However, she experienced serious psychotic symptoms, “sobbing and saying that she kept seeing her children, ages 2 to 10, being gruesomely murdered and that she herself had crafted plans to kill them,” according to Dr. Goueli.
He said, “It was like she was experiencing a movie, like ‘Kill Bill.’ It’s a horrifying thing that here’s this well-accomplished woman and she’s like ‘I love my kids, and I don’t know why I feel this way that I want to decapitate them.’”
Dr. Goueli described that she had become infected with the COVID in the spring having only mild physical symptoms, but, months later, she said she heard a voice that first told her to kill herself and then told her to kill her children.
Nationwide, doctors have been reporting similar cases. In fact, a small number of COVID-19 patients with no history of mental health problems are developing severe psychiatric symptoms weeks after contracting the virus.
A recent British study, conducted on more than 150 patients hospitalized COVID-19 patients, has found that 10 people had “new-onset psychosis.”
Dr. Colin Smith of Duke University Medical Center, Durham, said, “My guess is any place that is seeing COVID is probably seeing this.”
However, some experts believe that such extreme psychiatric illness will affect only a small number of patients.
Dr. Vilma Gabbay of the Psychiatry Research Institute at Montefiore Einstein in the Bronx said, “Some of the neurotoxins that are reactions to immune activation can go to the brain, through the blood-brain barrier, and can induce this damage.”
However, Dr. Gabbay said, “Brain scans, spinal fluid analyses, and other tests didn’t find any brain infection.” To know more about what Dr. Goueli and other experts have to say, read the article titled “Small Number of Covid Patients Develop Severe Psychotic Symptoms” published in The New York Times.
