Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is one of the most common mental illnesses. It is a severe, chronic, and disabling brain disease. Schizophrenia is often mistaken for multiple personalities, or dissociative identity disorder. However, they are two different mental illnesses. Schizophrenia occurs when an individual splits off from reality and are unable to tell what is real and what is not real. An individual with schizophrenia has one personality, but that personality has split off from reality. It affects one percent of the population and affects men and women equally, but men tend to develop schizophrenia earlier in life.

The behavior of people with schizophrenia is very strange and shocking. To be diagnosed as having schizophrenia, an individual must have several symptoms. The symptoms include delusions, hallucinations, and abnormal speech. The delusions that occur are bizarre, false beliefs that seem real to the person, but in actuality do not exist. Another common symptom is delusions of persecution and grandeur, which involves incomplete lines of thought. Individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia either speak very little and have disorganized speech. They jump from one idea to another, repeating words, or making up new words. I was able to obtain a piece of writing from a person diagnosed with schizophrenia.

There are several different types of schizophrenia. Some include: paranoid, catatonic, disorganized, undifferentiated, and residual schizophrenia. Paranoid schizophrenia is when the person has auditory hallucinations or delusional thoughts. Individuals have constant feeling of being watched, followed, and persecuted. The effect of an individual's life varies, depending on the different kinds of impairment. Some people may require hospitalization, while others can maintain an active family life. People who have a higher level of functioning before their illness occurs, are more likely to have a better outcome.

Experts don't know exactly what causes the physiological disorder of schizophrenia. However, they have come up with three explanations as to the determinant. These are the psychodynamic, learning, and cognitive explanations. The psychodynamic explanation states that problems with child-rearing and stress are the factors that tend to cause schizophrenia. The learning explanation explains that individuals with schizophrenia use abnormal behaviors to get rewards such as attention. Labels, roles, and expectations also may cause an individual to develop schizophrenia. The cognitive explanation states that unusual experiences are the causes rather than the results of schizophrenia.

Additionally, problems with brain development and activity are alternate explanations for the development of schizophrenia. When the brain does not develop adequately and/or deteriorates faster than normal and low levels of brain activity are present, schizophrenia tends to develop. Genetic factors also contribute to the cause of schizophrenia. If an individual has a biological relative with schizophrenia, they are more at