Woman and Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia does not affect men and women in the same way. Because of the difference in certain chemicals in men and women, schizophrenia differs among them. If genetics show you will have schizophrenia in your lifetime, it is likely for men to get hit with it in their late teens- early twenties, and in women, it develops about 5-10 years later. The expression of the illness also differs; men show more apathy, flat affect, cognitive disturbance, paucity of speech, and social isolation, whereas women are more often depressed. Estrogen has a role in explaining the differences of schizophrenia between men and women. Estrogen neutralizes the neurotoxic effects of a variety of stressors, this could explain the reason in the later onset of schizophrenia symptoms in women when compared with men. Estrogen action on neurotransmitter systems may also explain why women respond to antipsychotics faster than men and at lower doses, and why side effects differ.

In my opinion, and according to many studies, schizophrenia tends to hit men harder than women due to the fact of estrogen. Estrogen plays a protective role for women who have schizophrenia. It is said that many men suffer from schizophrenia more severely than women because men get hit with the illness earlier, and they are way less responsive to medication and treatments. Men usually have suicidal thoughts and are more likely to actually commit suicide than women who had thoughts like this. Women with medication schizophrenics are more likely to marry, hold a job, and live almost normal lives. But schizophrenic men often have symptoms that persist, and they tend to have more personal troubles such as being unemployed or homeless, which is way harder to cope with. The inferior parietal lobule has a lot to due with the reason in why men have a harder time coping with schizophrenia. The IPL is part of the brain, and each side of the brain has one. In a healthy male, the left IPL is larger than the right, but in a schizophrenic, it is reversed. And the IPL is usually about sixteen percent smaller than a healthy male. For females, this is less severe and they did not show such differences in sizes of the IPL. By fact, men usually do have a harder time coping with schizophrenia.