Delusions of Pregnancy in Saudi Arabia: A Socio-Cultural Perspective

Abstract

Delusion of pregnancy is an uncommon symptom that has been reported in both male and female patients who suffer from a variety of organic and functional psychiatric disorders. This study describes seven Saudi females who developed this symptom during the course of chronic schizophrenia ( n= 5) and mood disorders ( n= 2). This symptom serves multiple socio-cultural functions, which are described.

The attribution of psychotic symptoms to jinn in Islamic patients

“…Transcultural Psychiatry 52 (1) showed an equally favourable initial response (Qureshi et al, 2001;Studer, 2010;Younis, 2000). One of the patients had a relapse after cessation of the medication (Studer, 2010).…”

Delusion of Pregnancy

“…Abdominal and vaginal coenesthesias and the various organic changes (sarcoidosis with lung fibrosis and dyspnoea, menopause 3 years ago, obesity, navel hernia, presumed neuroleptic-induced galactorrhoea) were misinterpreted by the patient as pregnancy, as documented in the literature [7,16,17,22,37,39,42,43].…”

“…A delusion of pregnancy is not nosologically specific and can occur as a symptom in a variety of disorders. In addition to schizophrenic psychoses [1, 14, 25, 32, 37-39, 42, 43, 48, 49], symptoms of a pregnancy delusion have been described in affective psychoses [4,8,24,32,33], depressive disorders [11,37,49], epilepsy [13,30,32,37,45], dementia and other organic brain disorders [5,13,20,24,27,30,32,34,37,39,41,46,49].…”

“…amenorrhoea or changes in breasts, abdomen and genitals) can occur. Pseudocyesis can be delusional and can only be distinguished from a delusion of pregnancy by the fact that appropriate physical symptoms of pregnancy do appear [9,10,15,16,17,21,23,27,28,32,35,37,44].…”

Delusion of pregnancy associated with antipsychotic induced metabolic syndrome

“…There are several physical manifestations of metabolic syndrome (Bonow and Eckel 2003); however, the psychological and psychiatric impact of metabolic syndrome has not been studied to date, which may be important not only for predicting outcome, but also may determine presentation of psychopathology (Bitton et al 1991;Wirshing et al 2002). Delusion of pregnancy is one such rare symptom seen due to organic, functional or drug-induced causes (Qureshi et al 2001). An earlier report had described delusion of pregnancy in young girls due to drug-induced lactation and amenorrhea accompanied by breast changes (Cramer 1971).…”