Symptoms of schizophrenia

• Symptoms are split 🪓 into being either positive (additional, something beyond normal experience) or negative (the loss of something)
• The positive symptoms of schizophrenia include hallucinations, delusions and disordered thinking/speech 💬
• Hallucinations


  Bizarre 🤔, unreal perceptions of the world.

  Usually auditory, can be visual (seeing things people can't) or olfactory (smells) or tactile (feeling things that don't exist).

  Many schizophrenics report hearing voices telling them to do things such as harming themselves 😥
• Delusions


  Bizarre beliefs that seem real to the person, but aren't real. These delusions can be paranoid

  Often beliefs they are being followed or spied on. They may think there's cameras 📸 in their home with people watching them.

  Delusions may also make people feel they have more power than they do; e.g. they think 🤔 they're famous.

  They may also experience delusions of reference, events in their environment may relate to their delusions. E.g. There are messages in TV shows directed to them.
• Disordered thinking/speech 


  Abnormal thought processes, they struggle to organise their thoughts 🤔 and this shows up their speech 💬.

  They may slip from one topic to another, even mid-sentence, often speaking incoherently
• Negative symptoms include speech poverty, avolition, flattened affect and anhedonia
• Avolition is lack of motivation, they lose interest in activities they used to enjoy doing. They become withdrawn and isolated from society 🙈. Often staying in the house 🏠 for long periods of time with no motivation to do anything
• Speech poverty 


  Lessening of speech fluency and fewer words, showing blocked thoughts.

  Patients still know words, but struggle to produce them.

  They also may use simple syntax when speaking; associated with a longer illness 😨 and an early onset of schizophrenia
• Flattened affect 


  Reduction in emotional expression 😐

  Showing less body language and facial movements. They also show a loss of their use in paralinguistic features, such as intonation, which are used to show meaning in utterances
• Anhedonia 


  A loss of interest and pleasure in most/all activities or a lack of reactivity to normally pleasurable stimuli.

  Physical anhedonia is the inability to experience physical pleasure, such as food and touch.

  Social anhedonia is the inability to get pleasure from social situations e.g. when taking to others.

  Social anhedonia overlaps with other disorders, such as depression, but physical anhedonia is exclusive to schizophrenia