Derailment (thought disorder)

In psychiatry, derailment (aka loosening of association, asyndesis, asyndetic thinking, knight's move thinking, entgleisen, disorganised thinking[1]) categorises any speech that sequences of unrelated or barely related ideas compose; the topic often changes from one sentence to another.[2][3][1]

In a mild manifestation, this thought disorder is characterized by slippage of ideas further and further from the point of a discussion. Derailment can often be manifestly caused by intense emotions such as euphoria or hysteria. Some of the synonyms given above (loosening of association, asyndetic thinking) are used by some authors to refer just to a loss of goal: discourse that sets off on a particular idea, wanders off and never returns to it. A related term is tangentiality—it refers to off-the-point, oblique or irrelevant answers given to questions.[2] In some studies on creativity, knight's move thinking—while describing a similarly loose association of ideas—is not considered a mental disorder or the hallmark of one; it is sometimes used as a synonym for lateral thinking.[4][5][6]

  1. ^ a b World Health Organization (2023). "MB25.02 Disorganised thinking". International Classification of Diseases, eleventh revision – ICD-11. Genova – icd.who.int.
  2. ^ a b P.J. McKenna, Schizophrenia and related syndromes, Psychology Press, 1997, ISBN 0-86377-790-2, pp. 14-15
  3. ^ A.C.P. Sims, Symptoms in the mind: an introduction to descriptive psychopathology, Edition 3, Elsevier Health Sciences, 2003, ISBN 0-7020-2627-1, pp. 155-156
  4. ^ Cite error: The named reference pp was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  5. ^ Tudor Rickards, Creativity and problem solving at work, Edition 3, Gower Publishing, 1997, ISBN 0-566-07961-5, p. 81
  6. ^ Richard Courtney, Drama and intelligence: a cognitive theory, McGill-Queen's Press, 1990, ISBN 0-7735-0766-3, p. 128