Brain scans, spinal fluid analyzes and other tests found no brain infection, said Dr. Gabbay, whose hospital treated two patients with post-Covid psychosis: a 49-year-old man who heard voices and believed he was the devil and a woman 34 years old who started carrying a knife, undressing in front of strangers and putting hand sanitizer in the food.
Physically, most of these patients did not become very sick with Covid-19, the reports indicate. The patients Dr. Goueli treated did not have any breathing problems, but they did have subtle neurological symptoms, such as tingling in the hands, dizziness, headaches or decreased smell. Then, two weeks to several months later, he said, they “develop this profound psychosis, which is really dangerous and scary for everyone around them”.
Also impressive is that most patients were in their 30s, 40s and 50s. “It is very rare for you to develop this type of psychosis in this age group,” said Goueli, as these symptoms often accompany schizophrenia in young people or dementia in older patients. And some patients – like the physiotherapist who was admitted to the hospital – understood that something was wrong, while generally “people with psychosis do not realize that they have lost touch with reality”.
Some post-Covid patients who developed psychosis required weeks of hospitalization, during which doctors tried different medications before finding one that would help.
Dr. Robert Yolken, a specialist in neurovirology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, said that while people may recover physically from Covid-19, in some cases their immune systems may be unable to shut down or may remain involved by cause of “delayed release of a small amount of virus. “
Persistent immune activation is also a major explanation for brain fog and memory problems that plague many Covid survivors, and Emily Severance, a schizophrenia specialist at Johns Hopkins, said that post-Covid cognitive and psychiatric effects may result from “something similar happening in the brain”.