Good Essay On Schizophrenia

Question 1. Schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a severe debilitating brain disorder which affects multiple domains: feeling, thinking, hearing, seeing, speaking and acting. The most prominent feature of the patients is the loss of the contact with real world, or at least the distorted perception of reality. They can feel the other people try to control or even pursue them (feeling), believe they can do them harm (thinking), hear strange or unusual voices (hearing), see unexisting things (seeing), be silent for hours or pronounce odd things (speaking), and behave in strange ways (acting). Schizophrenia is characterized by distortion of the border between the reality and the imaginary world which exists in the patient’s brain leading to impossibility of the dialogue with the individual or even his\her complete withdrawal from the reality. The severity of schizophrenia depends on the age of its onset which most frequently occurs in late adolescence or early adulthood; the earlier onset is characterized by a more severe clinic course and more prominent signs and symptoms.
Question 2. Symptoms. The symptoms of schizophrenia can vary in different disease subtypes. Three broad groups described by National Institute of Mental Health are positive symptoms, negative symptoms, and cognitive disorders. Positive symptoms include psychotic patterns of behaviours atypical for healthy people, such as delusions (false beliefs), hallucinations (“voices” or unusual visions), thought disorders (dysfunctional thinking), movement disorders (disorganized or chaotic movements, agitation (catatonic behaviour). Negative symptoms are disruptions of the normal behavioural patterns (silence for hours, affective speech), and cognitive disorders include troubles with memory, concentration and information processing. DSM-V highlights the diagnosis of schizophrenia can be made when at least two of the specified five symptoms (hallucinations, delusions, disorganized speech\behaviour, or any negative symptoms) have been present for 6 months, with at least 1 month in an active form. However some of these emerging symptoms (hostility and suspiciousness, depression, memory and concentration loss, odd way of speaking, extreme emotional reactions or emotionlessness) can be early warning signs of the disease. The severity of symptoms correlates with the disease stage and increases from the stage of presymptomatic risk up to chronic illness.