decompensate
Americanverb (used without object)
Usage
What does decompensate mean? To decompensate means to lose the ability to maintain one’s state of mental health, typically due to some kind of stress. The word decompensate is most often applied to someone who is having a breakdown in their mental health mechanisms, especially someone who has an existing mental illness or psychological condition. Example: If the patient loses their normal support system, they may decompensate, resulting in an aggravation of their condition.
Etymology
Origin of decompensate
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
As we watch Amy slowly decompensate, trapped between her boarded-up windows and creepy basement, it’s unclear whether her most urgent threat will come from without or within.
From New York Times ● Feb. 7, 2023
And staying institutionalized for longer than necessary can cause people to decompensate and come off the discharge list.
From Seattle Times ● Dec. 16, 2022
“The ability to continuously remotely monitor” is key, Wright said, because covid-19 patients “can decompensate quickly” and need to be moved to intensive care.
From Washington Post ● Apr. 17, 2020
Would I bet my license that you won’t decompensate if I don’t admit you?
From Slate ● Apr. 15, 2020
Are you so sugar deprived the rest of the year that you have to decompensate by adding more sugar to your dessert?
From Los Angeles Times ● Dec. 15, 2014
“Mr. Thompson was completely reliant on his caregivers to provide both day-to-day care as well as the acute life-saving care that was needed to save him from the untreated decompensated schizophrenia,” the report says.
From Seattle Times ● May 22, 2023
In the punitive, nontherapeutic environment of the jail, R.G. quickly decompensated.
From Seattle Times ● Mar. 2, 2023
He decompensated radically because he was very isolated out there on that farm.
From Salon ● Aug. 27, 2019
If approved it could become the first significant new treatment for acute decompensated heart failure patients in a generation.
From Forbes ● Jan. 7, 2014
Its chief usefulness is in steadying the decompensated heart, improving the conduction of impulses, and increasing the tone of the cardiac muscle.
From Arteriosclerosis and Hypertension: with Chapters on Blood Pressure, 3rd Edition. by Warfield, Louis Marshall
More beds for mental health treatment are needed “so that we can get people the help they need before they end up decompensating to the point where they have to be restrained.”
From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 25, 2023
He appears to be mentally decompensating, and serves as a case study in the intersection of racism and health care and how mental illness is often misdiagnosed and untreated in the Black community.
From Salon ● Dec. 2, 2022
And his turn as Armond, the decompensating manager of a luxury resort in “The White Lotus” solidified his one-to-watch status, just as he approached 50.
From New York Times ● Dec. 10, 2021
Or they must have a grave disability and be decompensating: They stop eating or taking care of themselves or their home.
From Seattle Times ● Nov. 6, 2021
Patients with tuberculosis, decompensating cardiovascular lesions, or other advanced organic disease, may have serious complications precipitated by esophagoscopy.
From Bronchoscopy and Esophagoscopy A Manual of Peroral Endoscopy and Laryngeal Surgery by Jackson, Chevalier
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
