Symptoms are the patient's complaints. They are highly subjective and amenable to suggestion and to alterations in the patient's mood and other mental processes.
The first encounter between psychiatrist or therapist and patient (or client) is multi-phased. The mental health practitioner notes the patient's history and administers or prescribes a physical examination to rule out certain medical conditions. Armed with the results, the diagnostician now observes the patient carefully and compiles lists of signs and symptoms, grouped into syndromes.
Symptoms are the patient's complaints. They are highly subjective and amenable to suggestion and to alterations in the patient's mood and other mental processes. Symptoms are no more than mere indications. Signs, on the other hand, are objective and measurable. Signs are evidence of the existence, stage, and extent of a pathological state. Headache is a symptom - shortsightedness (which may well be the cause of the headache) is a sign.
Here is a partial list of the most important signs and symptoms in alphabetical order:
Affect (sign)
We all experience emotions, but each and every one of us expresses them differently. Affect is HOW we express our innermost feelings and how other people observe and interpret our expressions. Affect is characterized by the type of emotion involved (sadness, happiness, anger, etc.) and by the intensity of its expression. Some people have flat affect: they maintain "poker faces", monotonous, immobile, apparently unmoved. This is typical of the Schizoid Personality Disorder Others have blunted, constricted, or broad (healthy) affect. Patients with the dramatic (Cluster B) personality disorders - especially the Histrionic and the Borderline - have exaggerate and labile (changeable) affect. They are "drama queens".
In certain mental health disorders, the affect is inappropriate. For instance: such people laugh when they recount a sad or horrifying event or when they find themselves is morbid settings (e.g., in a funeral).
Ambivalence
We have all come across situations and dilemmas which evoked equipotent - but opposing and conflicting - emotions or ideas. Now, imagine someone with a permanent state of inner turmoil: her emotions come in mutually exclusive pairs, her thoughts and conclusions arrayed in contradictory dyads. The result is, of course, extreme indecision, to the point of utter paralysis and inaction. Sufferers of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders and the Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder are highly ambivalent.
Anhedonia
When we lose the urge to seek pleasure and to prefer it to nothingness or even pain, we become anhedonic. Depression inevitably involves anhedonia. the depressed are unable to conjure sufficient mental energy to get off the couch and do something because they find everything equally boring and unattractive.
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