VIDEO: Tardive dyskinesia social stigma impacts patients' mental health

Editor’s note: This is an automatically generated transcript, which has been slightly edited for clarity. Please notify editor@healio.com if there are concerns regarding accuracy of the transcription.

Tardive dyskinesia is a movement disorder that's secondary to medication side effects from medicines that block dopamine. Most of the movements that occur are around the face or Peri oral, but also the limbs can be affected and other body parts too. So in terms of quality of life, that can be physically uncomfortable to have these movements, it can be annoying. There's often a lot of social stigma attached with it when patients are aware that other people are noticing the movements and that can be really distressing and affect quality of life in that way. It can have an adverse effect on the mental health of the patient too. Often the drugs that cause tardive dyskinesia are medicines that are used to treat depression, so when a patient is already depressed, then develops this movement disorder, it can certainly worsen than their depression, and often the movements are severe enough that they impair an individual's ability to do their activities of daily living, things like eating, speaking, feeding themselves, sometimes the movements can be severe enough to interfere with those things.