Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is one of the most common mental illnesses in America. About one of every on hundred people is affected by schizophrenia. This disorder is found throughout the world in different nationalities and cultures. Schizophrenia affects not just men but women equally, even though men appear to develop schizophrenia earlier than women. This illness is a group of serious brain disorders in which reality is interpreted abnormally. Schizophrenia results in hallucinations, delusions, and disordered thinking and behavior. People with schizophrenia withdraw from the people and activities in the world around them, retreating into an inner world marked by psychosis.

The behavior of people with schizophrenia is often very strange and shocking, people with this illness have a tendency not being able tell the difference between what is real and what is not. There is a book that, The American Psychiatric Association, has published guidelines that are used to classify people with mental disorders. Before a person is diagnosed with this illness several symptoms that a person must go through must been detected. These symptoms include two or more of the following behaviors for a length of at least one month. One of the most common symptoms is having delusions. Delusions are bizarre and false beliefs. These beliefs seem real to the person with schizophrenia, but they are not real. For example, a person may believe that aliens or spies are controlling his or her behavior, mind and thoughts. Sometimes these delusions can be paranoid in nature. People with paranoia have an unreal fear or suspicion that someone is out to get them. Another symptom is hallucinations which also are bizarre, unreal perceptions of the environment. These hallucinations can be auditory- meaning sometimes the person hears voices, it also includes visual- meaning seeing lights or objects or faces. This illness consists of disorganized thinking and which of abnormal thoughts are usually measured by disorganized speech. People with schizophrenia speak very little, or a person will change the topic midway through the sentence. Negative symptoms are the absence of normal behavior. Delusions, hallucinations and abnormal speech indicate the presence of abnormal behavior. Negative symptoms include social withdrawal, absence of emotion and expression, reduced energy and motivation of doing activities. Sometimes people with this illness have poor hygiene and grooming habits.

When people show any of these symptoms, they are considered to be in the active phase of the disorder. Often people with schizophrenia have milder symptoms before and after the active phase. There are three basic types of schizophrenia. All people who have schizophrenia have lost tough with reality. The three main types of this illness are disorganized schizophrenia which is lack of emotion or disorganized speech, Catatonic schizophrenia is a waxy flexibility that reduces movement, ridges’ posture and sometimes too much in the movement. There are probably multiple caused for schizophrenia and scientists do not know all of the factors that produce this mental disorder. Genetics, twin studies and the environment are components toward the development of schizophrenia. There are many treatments of schizophrenia. Drugs to treat this illness are called antipsychotic medication. This type of drug was first developed in the 1950’s. They have proved to be highly successful in treating the symptoms of schizophrenia. The different types of antipsychotics work best on different symptoms of the disorder and are not addictive.