Schizophrenia Definitions

• Schizophrenia


  - Mental disorder

  - where contact with reality is impaired
• Positive Symptoms


  - addition to normal experiences

  - hallucinations and delusions
• Hallucinations


  - positive symptom

  - sensory experience

  - no basis in reality

  - distorted perceptions of present things
• Delusions


  - positive symtpom

  - beliefs that have no basis in reality
• Negative symptoms


  - loss of usual experience

  - loss of clear thinking or motivation
• Speech poverty


  - negative symptom

  - reduced frequency and quality of speech
• Avolition


  - negative symptom

  - loss of motivation

  - low activity levels
• Co-morbidity


  - When 2 disorders occur together

  - eg, schizophrenia and a personality disorder
• Symptom overlap


  - two or more conditions share symptoms
• Neural correlates


  - patterns or structure in the brain

  - occur with an experience

  - implicit in the origins of the experience
• Dopamine


  - neurotransmitter

  - excitatory effect

  - unusually high levels assosciated with schizophrenia
• Family dysfunction


  - poor family communication

  - cold parenting

  - expressed emotion

  - risk factors in developing and maintaining schizophrenia
• Cognitive explanations


  - explanations with a focus on mental processes

  -thinking, language and attention
• Dysfunctional thought processing


  - information processing that doesn't represent reality
• Antipsychotics


  - reduce intensity of symptoms (mainly positive)
• Typical antipsychotics


  - first generation

  - since the 1950s

  - work as dopamine antagonists

  - eg, chlorpromazine
• Atypical antipsychotics


  - after typical antipsychotics

  - target a range of neurotransmitter's

  - eg, dopamine and serotnin

  - eg, clozapine and risperidone
• Cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT)


  - based on cognitive and behavioural techniques

  - cognitive - aims to deal with thinking

  - eg, challenge negative thoughts

  - therapy has behavioural techniques
• Family therapy


  - psychological therapy

  - aim of improving the family communication

  - reducing the stress of being a family
• Token economies


  - behavioural modification

  - desirable behaviour is encouraged through selective reinforcement.

  - eg, tokens are given when engaging with desirably behaviour

  - tokens - secondary reinforcers, exchanged for primary reinforcers - reward
• Interactionist approach


  - explain development of schizophrenia in biological and psychological factors

  - factors interact
• Diathesis - stress model

  - Interactionist approach to explaining

  - schizophrenia explained as a underlying vulnerability (Diathesis) and a trigger (stressor)

  - both necessary to trigger the disease

  - genes and trauma are diatheses

  - stress can be psychological or biological