Schizophrenia - INS Mental Health

Schizophrenia is a brain illness that affects one per cent of people all over the world. The people can be young or old, women or men, it doesn’t matter. It’s diagnosis can be more difficult than it might seem because the symptoms of schizophrenia can be similar at times to other major brain disorders such as bipolar disorder or even major depression.

Schizophrenia is characterized by a disruption in cognition and emotion, affecting the most fundamental human attributes: language, thought, perception, affect, and sense of self. The entire sense of self is changed when a person is schizophrenic.

Schizophrenia symptoms are divided into three categories: positive symptoms, disorganized symptoms, and negative symptoms.

The most common symptom is delusions – patients think that they are somebody other than themselves, often someone famous. Hallucinations follow close behind in frequency. These can be hearing things nobody else does, seeing things that aren’t there, or even smelling and feeling something that nobody else does.

Disorganized thinking and disorganized speech are also present in people with schizophrenia. Other disorganized symptoms are difficulty understanding, poor concentration, poor memory, difficulty expressing thoughts, and difficulty integrating thoughts, feelings and behaviour.

Catatonic behaviour is characterized by stupor/inactivity. The person with this can stand still for a long time, staring at something, and nothing will disturb him or cause him to change position.

Negative symptoms include a lack of emotion, the inability to enjoy activities as much as before, low energy (the person sits around and sleeps much more than normal) lack of interest in life and low motivation.

Schizophrenia is one of the more serious mental disorders. It can, with proper treatment, be controlled. The main thing is to make sure medication is not discontinued. This so often happens in schizophrenic patients who do not have anyone keeping track of things like medication.