Do I Have Schizophrenia?

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Sep 042010
 

Commonly known as insanity or madness, schizophrenia is a chronic psychotic disorder with onset typically occurring in adolescence or young adulthood. Schizophrenia results in fluctuating, gradually deteriorating, or relatively stable disturbances in thinking, behavior, and perception. Severity can range from mild and subtle with very good adaptation to everyday life, to severely disabling requiring constant supervision in a restricted environment.
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Schizophrenia is a brain disease that interferes with normal brain functioning. It causes affected people to exhibit odd and often highly irrational or disorganized behavior. Because the brain is the organ in the body where thinking, feeling and understanding of the world takes place (where consciousness exists), a brain disease like schizophrenia alters thinking, feeling, understanding and consciousness itself in affected persons, changing their lives for the worse.

Causes of Schizophrenia

Experts now agree that schizophrenia develops as a result of interplay between biological predisposition (for example, inheriting certain genes) and the kind of environment a person is exposed to. These lines of research are converging: brain development disruption is now known to be the result of genetic predisposition and environmental stressors early in development (during pregnancy or early childhood), leading to subtle alterations in the brain that make a person susceptible to developing schizophrenia.

It’s not known what causes schizophrenia. However, researchers believe that an interaction of genetics and environment may cause schizophrenia. Problems with certain naturally occurring brain chemicals, including the neurotransmitters dopamine and glutamate, also may contribute to schizophrenia.

Symtoms Of Schizophrenia

Bizarre or inappropriate behaviour
Preoccupation with spiritual matters
Incoherent illogical speech

Distorted Perceptions of Reality

People with schizophrenia may have perceptions of reality that are strikingly different from the reality seen and shared by others around them. Living in a world distorted by hallucinations and delusions, individuals with schizophrenia may feel frightened, anxious, and confused.

Cognitive symptoms (or cognitive deficits) are problems with attention, certain types of memory, and the executive functions that allow us to plan and organize. Cognitive deficits can also be difficult to recognize as part of the disorder but are the most disabling in terms of leading a normal life.

Over time, it becomes difficult to function in daily life. You may not be able to go to work or school. You may have troubled relationships, partly because of difficulty reading social cues or others’ emotions. You may lose interest in activities you once enjoyed.

Diagnosing Schizophrenia

Using mental state features alone (such as third person auditory hallucinations) is not a reliable way to diagnose schizophrenia. After all, psychotic features such as hallucinations and delusions can occur in affective disorders, dementia and acute organic psychoses. It is therefore important to look at the form of the illness as well as the content.

Treatment of Schizophrenia

Patients with schizophrenia often do not respond to treatment or only partially improve and remain functionally impaired. While medication has been found to be effective for the treatment of “positive” symptoms of the disease, treatment of the “negative symptoms” of depression (including lack of energy, motivation, and emotional range) has historically not been very successful. In nearly 25 percent of those patients, the condition is so refractory to neuroleptic pharmacotherapy that they require custodial care.

First, ensure that your loved one is taking prescribed medications. One of the most common reasons that people with schizophrenia relapse into a new episode is that they quit taking medication. Family members might see much improvement and mistakenly assume medications may no longer be needed. That is a disastrous assumption. A later psychotic outbreak will likely happen

The large majority of people with schizophrenia show substantial improvement when treated with antipsychotic drugs. Some patients, however, are not helped very much by the medications and a few do not seem to need them.

Therapy of Schizophrenia

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy has been shown to be good for a person with schizophrenia.
Psychodynamic therapy is quite controversial. The actual therapy does not seem to work so well.
When a person suffers from schizophrenia, it is helpful for the whole family to get support. This usually reduces stress and worry, and helps people cope.

Latest Video to symtoms of schizophrenia

Learning About Paranoid Schizophrenia

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Feb 152010
 

In the movie,” A glorious Mind”, Russel Crowe portrays a gleaming mathematician John Nash whose work is challenged by his bouts of paranoid schizophrenia which he constantly battled with throughout his life. Despite this ailment, John Nash was able to acquire the ample Prize. This battle between John Nash and his ailment was the genuine anecdote of the movie and it won the Best narrate Category in the 2002 Academy Awards.

Paranoid Schizophrenia is unprejudiced one of the forms of schizophrenia diagnosed. This type of ailment is also one of the most popular as people living with it have a distrust for anything and everyone and feel that someone or something is out to regain them. This brain disorder is one that challenges not only the patient but those loved ones. Affecting the perception of the patient, it affects the very patient’s social interaction, belief processes, logic and perception of the actual world. In short a person with schizophrenia acts and talks in his or her beget world where it seems everything is illogical but him or her.

There is a classic television series called the Twilight Zone which was created by Rod Serling. In one episode, a man suddenly wakes up to pick up that his means of words have now different meanings in the time he is living in. What dog meant before now means tree. This proved to be understandably confusing to the protagonist and he had no option but to adapt and re-learn the meanings to the words. People with schizophrenia often do not have that option if the sickness is left untreated. Prior to the last century, those with paranoid schizophrenia were sent to mental institutions and left there. These days there are medicines which can act as inhibitors to the chemical imbalances that may trigger schizophrenia, most of which are inhibitors to cortisol, glutamate, and dopamine. Counseling is also a system of treatment stale for people living with schizophrenia and these sessions do monitor the stages and incidents of any episodes as such.

Paranoid schizophrenia, if left untreated, could have detrimental effects to the patient. It may lead to suicide tendencies or worse yet, may cause them to act violently and such actions may result in unprovoked and senseless homicides. Though this is rare in most cases, some defense lawyers employ paranoid schizophrenia as a defense for those charged with execute and homicide. colorful the early signs of paranoid schizophrenia such as social withdrawal and hostility or suspiciousness are key factors for appropriate diagnosis and treatment. This ailment may not be cured but can be treated and contained.

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