symptoms

• Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder which is characterised by a profound disruption to cognition, emotion and psychosis
• schizophrenia effects language, thought, perception, emotions and sense of self
• Schizophrenia is the most common psychotic disorder
• The prevalence rate of schizophrenia is around 1% worldwide
• positive symptoms of schizophrenia reflect an excess distortion to normal functions
• positive symptoms of schizophrenia:

  • hallucinations
  • delusions
  • disorganised speech
  • catatonic/disorganised behaviour
• • Hallucinations - distortions/exaggerations of perceptions of environments, usually auditory (hearing voices) but also can be visual (seeing lights), olfactory (smelling things) or tactile (feeling bugs crawling on you)
• • Delusions - firmly held incorrect beliefs that are caused by distortions of reasoning or misinterpretations of perceptions or experiences: delusions can be paranoid (persecutory) in nature - believing they are being stalked. Other times, they are delusions of grandeur - inflated beliefs of power and importance. Or there are delusions of reference - events in the environment that appear to be directly related to them like TV messages. 
• • Disorganised speech - the result of abnormal thought processes, where the individual has problems organising their thoughts, evident in their speech. they are easily derailed and slip from one topic to another, even mid sentence - in severe cases it may sound incoherent like complete gibberish.
• Catatonic/disorganised behaviour - (least common) the inability or motivation to initiate a task, or to complete it once its started, which results to difficulties in daily living such as poor hygiene. Catatonic behaviours are characterised by a reduced reaction to the immediate environment, rigid postures or aimless motor activity
• negative symptoms of schizophrenia Reflect a reduction or loss of normal functions that persistent and weaken the persons ability to cope with everyday activities
• negative symptoms:

  • speech poverty
  • abolition
  • anhedonia (physical and social)
  • affective flattening
• • Speech poverty - (alogia) lessoning of speech fluency and productivity - thought to reflect slowing or blocked thoughts; they produce fewer words on a verbal fluency task or less complete syntax - difficulty of spontaneously producing words 
• • Avolition - a reduction in interests and desired as well as an inability to initiate and persist goal-directed behaviour - this must be self- directed, not because they don’t have any options
• • Affective flattening: reduction in the range and intensity of emotional expression, including facial expressions, voice tones, eye contacts and body language
• • Anhedonia - a lack of interest or pleasure in all or almost all activites or a lack of reactivity to normally pleasurable stimuli - it can be persuasive or confined to certain aspects of an experience

  Physical anhedonia is the inability to experience physical pleasures - more related to schizophrenia specifically 

  Social anhedonia is the inability to experience pleasure from interpersonal situations - overlaps with depression