Characterised by a profound disruption of cognition and emotion which affects a person’s language, thought, perception, affect and even sense of self.
Media often links to violence. However only 8% of diagnosed with Schizophrenia in a year will commit a serious act of violence.
This is less than the percentage of depressives or people with personality disorders who will commit an act of violence
symptoms vs features:
Features of a mental health disorder usually involve statistics about the disorder, or aspects of it such as how the illness develops or how other factors such as age and gender link.
Symptoms are what categorise the disorder with regard to how the person thinks, feels or behaves.
positive symptoms:
Hallucinations – HEARING OR SEEING THINGS (in some cultures positive) that are not there
Delusions – FALSE BELIEFS – thinking their movements are controlled by someone else e.g. paranoid delusion –the suffer thinks that someone is trying to mislead, manipulate or even kill them. Someone who suffers from delusions of grandeur may think they are in a prominent position of power, such as a king or think they can cure cancer.
postitive symptoms:
Thought disorders – make someone's speech hard to follow.
They might loose concentration at work, or complain of muddled thinking, they may become disorganised.
They make up words that have no meaning these are called ‘neologisms.’
‘Thought insertion’ (a person thinks their own thoughts are put there by someone else) or
‘thought broadcasting’ (thinking others can hear their thoughts.
evaluation of positive symptoms:
These tend to have greater weight when diagnosing schizophrenia but they can be affected by cultural differences so perhaps should not be weighted as strongly as negative symptoms, which might be more objectively measured.
Which positive symptoms do we know that are influenced by culture?
Delusions of grandeur - USA
Auditory hallucinations - Mexico
negative symptoms:
Often start before positive ones, sometimes years before the diagnosis. This is known as the prodromal period.
They include:
Avolition - Lack of energy and apathy – no motivation to do daily chores
Social withdrawal - avoiding family, not going out
Affective flattening - Flatness of emotions – face becomes emotionless, voice dulls
not looking after appearance and self – generally not adhering to expectations with regard to preserving a sense of self.
Alogia – lack of speech
evaluation of negative symptoms:
Seem less effected by cultural factors so they can be more objectively measured
Lack of energy etc can be easy measured but hearing voices or not is impossible
Prodromal features have been found to be present in many adolescents and cannot be taken to indicate the onset of schizophrenia on their own
cognitive symptoms:
Issues with concentration and memory
Hard to pay attention and become easily distracted.
Issues with executive functioning (decision making).
diagnosis: blood test:
Perkins et al (2004)
looked at 32 patients with symptoms supposedly showing psychosis and 35 controls
Looked for biomarkers of inflammatory oxidative stress, metabolism and hormones (all of which have been found to be abnorma)
They identified those 32 who went on to develop psychosis.
Blood test may not be far off!
What are the different types of schizophrenia based on research?