The research is finding cases of severe coronavirus-related psychosis.
A patient in Los Angeles undergoing treatment for COVID-19 also developed a serious mental disorder.
“We have a patient currently being treated for COVID. And while he was being treated for COVID he has psychosis and has emerged with totally abnormal beliefs,” said USC psychiatrist Keck Medicine, Dr. Steven Siegel.
Siegel explained that people with psychosis have thoughts and emotions so impaired that they lose touch with reality.
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“People believe that the police are after them or that their families are trying to hurt them,” he said.
Individual reports of coronavirus-related psychosis have been documented in medical journals. Some experts suspect that the cause may be the body’s immune system response or inflammation caused by the disease.
Dr. Charles Casassa is a neurologist at Loma Linda University Health.
“We see symptoms related to brain inflammation, which can include confusion and rarely psychosis,” he said.
Casassa is studying the effects of COVID-19 on patients with epilepsy and has found that the virus can cause more seizures.
“We also found that there are some patients who did not have a history of seizures before that, may subsequently have seizures once infected with COVID,” he said.
Research on how COVID-19 affects the brain is still in its early days. How long psychosis episodes can last and who is vulnerable are questions that need to be answered. However, Siegel says that people need to keep in mind that the condition is very rare.
“This is much more extreme. An extreme rarity than something people need to spend their energy worrying about,” said Siegel. “It is not likely to happen.”
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