Overview. Dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA) is a hormone produced by the body's adrenal glands. The body uses DHEA to make androgens and estrogens, the male and female sex hormones. DHEA levels peak at about age 25, then go down steadily as you get older. By the time people are 70 to 80 years old, their DHEA levels are only 10 to 20% those in young adults.
The Psychotic Symptom Rating Scales (Haddock et al., 1999) are semi-structured interviews designed to assess the subjective characteristics of hallucinations and delusions (see Appendix).
The term psychosis is very broad and can mean anything from relatively normal aberrant experiences through to the complex and catatonic expressions of schizophrenia and bipolar type 1 disorder. People experiencing a psychotic episode in the context of depression may experience persecutory or self-blaming delusions or hallucinations, while people experiencing a psychotic episode in the context of mania may form grandiose delusions.