clinical characteristics

• Schizophrenia


  A major psychotic disorder that causes a variety of possible psychological symptoms, it affects thought processes, but it is typified by a lack of contact with reality
• Schizophrenia


  • It is a long-term condition
  • Individuals with schizophrenia may have very different symptoms from each other
  • Kurt Schneider suggested categorising the symptoms of schizophrenia as either positive or negative symptoms
  • There are different explanations and currently no cure
• Positive symptoms


  An addition to 'normal' thought patterns and experience, involving the displaying of behaviours concerning a loss of touch with reality, including hallucinations and delusions
• Positive symptoms


  • Generally occur in acute, short episodes, with more normal periods in between
  • Respond well to medication
• Positive symptoms


  • Hallucinations
  • Delusions
  • Thought disorder
• Hallucinations


  Bizarre, unreal perceptions of the environment, including auditory hallucinations (hearing voices that other people can't hear) and visual hallucinations (seeing lights, objects or faces that other people can't see)
• Delusions


  Bizarre beliefs that seem real to the schizophrenic, but they are not real, including delusions of persecution/paranoid delusions (beliefs that people are plotting against them, that they're being spied upon, talked about by strangers or deliberately victimised) and delusions of grandeur (beliefs that they are someone grand or famous, or beliefs that they have special magical powers)
• Thought insertion


  When individuals with schizophrenia report that the thoughts in their head are not their own, believing that the thoughts have been placed in them by a third person
• Negative symptoms


  Involve the displaying of behaviours concerning disruption of normal emotions and actions, occurring in chronic, longer-lasting episodes, and are resistant to medication
• Negative symptoms


  • Contribute mainly when sufferers cannot function effectively in society, like relationships or at work
  • Often appear several years before an individual experiences their first acute schizophrenia episode, referred to as the prodromal period of schizophrenia
  • Symptoms appear gradually and worsen over time
• Negative symptoms


  • Becoming socially withdrawn
  • Lack of interest in own appearance and personal hygiene
• Cataleptic stupor


  Reduced motor activity in which schizophrenics can stand motionless like a statute in bizarre postures, or make fast, repetitive and useless movements
• Echopraxia


  Where people with schizophrenia mimic the movements of others around them
• Flattened affect or flat emotions

  The reduction in range and intensity of emotions
• In the UK to be diagnosed with schizophrenia a person's behaviour is assessed in relation to the criteria set out in the ICD-11 (version 11 of the International Statistical Classification of Diseases)
• At least two of the following symptoms must be present for a period of 1 month or more, and one must be a positive symptom: persistent delusions, persistent hallucinations, disorganised thinking, experiences of influence, passivity or control which can come along with either another positive symptom or negative symptoms (such as affective flattening, alogia/paucity of speech, avolition and anhedonia or grossly disorganised speech that impeded goal-directed activity or psychomotor disturbances)