schizophrenia

• schizophrenia symptoms

  1. Hallucinations: perceiving things around us that aren’t real, can involve all 5 senses
  2. Delusions: irrational beliefs about the world maintained despite contradictory evidence
  3. Avolition: lack of motivation and energy to do everyday tasks
  4. Speech Poverty: Lack of spontaneous, unprompted speech + Minimal speech.
• Positive symptoms


  abnormal, additional experiences people with schizophrenia have e.g. delusions and hallucinations
• negative symptoms


  absence of experiences that normal people do not usually have e.g. avolition and speech poverty
• diagnosing schizophrenia

  • schizophrenia is diagnosed with DSM-5
  • patients need to display at least 2 symptoms for 6months
• inter-rater reliability in schizophrenia 


  Researchers use inter-rater reliability to assess the reliability of a diagnosis of schizophrenia.

  BECK

  1962 diagnosis of schizophrenia = 52% similar

  2005 diagnosis of schizophrenia = 81% similar

  A diagnosis of schizophrenia is becoming more reliable over time.
• Validity of Schizophrenia Diagnosis: Rosenhan's Study


  Rosenhan got 8 volunteers, who pretended to have schizophrenia, admitted into hospital.

   Rosenhan conducted an observation study.

  Rosenhan tested how long it took doctors to declare that the volunteers were healthy.

  RESULTS-

  it took the doctors between 7 and 52 days to realise the diagnoses were wrong, and that the volunteers were healthy.

  The study showed that the diagnosis of schizophrenia can lack validity.
• cultural bias: study support

  chochrane conducted view comparing people diagnosed with schizophrenia in Caribbean vs in Britain (around 1% for both)

  People from Caribbean that lived in England however were 7x more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia than English person
• Gender Bias: Study Support

   They gave male and female doctors identical descriptions of a patient’s symptoms.

  gender of patient varied

  RESULTS-

  When the patient was described as female,  20 % of doctors diagnosed the patient with schizophrenia.

  When the patient was described as male,  56 % of doctors diagnosed the patient with schizophrenia.

  This indicates there may be alpha bias in the diagnosis of schizophrenia.