Schizophrenia

• Schizophrenia


  A mental health disorder that affects around one percent of the British population
• Schizophrenia


  • First symptoms usually appear between 15 and 45
  • Men are much more likely to develop schizophrenia than women
• A common misconception is schizophrenia is about having multiple personalities, but that's a disorder termed dissociative personality disorder
• Positive symptoms


  Experiences that are in addition to normal experience
• Negative symptoms


  Lack of normal experiences or abilities
• Positive symptoms of schizophrenia


  • Hallucinations
  • Delusions
• Hallucinations


  • Visual hallucinations - seeing distorted objects or things not there
  • Auditory hallucinations - hearing critical, abusive voices
• Delusions


  • Irrational beliefs about themselves, people around them, or the world
  • Examples: Persecution, Grandeur
• Negative symptoms of schizophrenia

  • Avolition - loss of normal motivation and energy
  • Speech poverty - loss of depth in communication, disorganized speech
• To be diagnosed with schizophrenia, two of the following symptoms need to be present for at least a month, and one has to be a positive symptom
• Reliability


  Consistency of results from a measuring tool
• Validity


  Truth, whether an individual truly has schizophrenia or if it exists as a distinct mental illness
• In 1963, a review of the diagnosis of 153 patients showed only a 54% concordance rate between doctors, suggesting low inter-rater reliability of schizophrenia diagnosis
• Comorbidity


  Schizophrenia is often diagnosed alongside other mental health conditions
• Research shows schizophrenia is assessed alongside depression 50% of the time, drug abuse 47% of the time, PTSD 29%, OCD 23%
• Symptom overlap between schizophrenia and other conditions, such as bipolar disorder, questions whether they are distinct and separate mental health conditions
• Men and women are equally likely to develop schizophrenia, but men tend to develop symptoms earlier, have worse social functioning, and are more likely to abuse alcohol and drugs
• People from an Afro-Caribbean heritage in the UK are nine times more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia than the general population, but this is likely due to cultural bias and misdiagnosis rather than genetic vulnerability
• Research shows the sex and race of both the client and the psychiatrist influence the diagnosis, with women less likely to be given a diagnosis of schizophrenia and black clients more likely
• Schizophrenia


  A mental disorder with a biological cause
• Biological cause of schizophrenia

  • Genetics
  • Neural structure
  • Neurotransmitter activity (particularly dopamine)
• Polygenetic


  Schizophrenia is caused by a large number of individual genes that increase the risk of developing it
• Research has identified 108 gene loci implicated in schizophrenia
• Some of the genes associated with schizophrenia are related to the nervous system and immune system</b>
• Concordance rate


  How often we see schizophrenia in both people in a relationship (e.g. twins)
• Concordance rate for schizophrenia is 48% in identical twins, 17% in non-identical twins, compared to 1% in the general population
• Adoption studies show 5.8% of children of schizophrenic mothers developed schizophrenia compared to 2% of children without schizophrenic mothers
• 36.8% of children of schizophrenic mothers developed schizophrenia if raised in a dysfunctional family
• Neurocorrelates


  Biological processes in the nervous system that are correlated with schizophrenia
• Dopamine hypothesis


  Too much or an imbalance of the neurotransmitter dopamine is responsible for symptoms of schizophrenia
• Dopamine-releasing drugs can produce schizophrenia-like symptoms in healthy people, and antipsychotics that reduce dopamine can decrease schizophrenia symptoms
• Other neurotransmitters like glutamate and serotonin may also play a role in schizophrenia
• Research shows enlarged ventricles (voids in the brain) are correlated with schizophrenia
• Determinism


  The view that schizophrenia is biologically inevitable and cannot be changed
• Reductionism


  Explaining schizophrenia as a basic cellular and chemical process
• Holism


  A better explanation for schizophrenia may be a holistic approach that includes both biological and psychological/environmental factors
• Schizophrenia


  A mental disorder characterized by a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behavior, leading to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion, and a sense of mental fragmentation
• Psychological theories of schizophrenia


  • Communication styles within the family have a role to play in the development of the disorder
  • Cognitive explanations suggest schizophrenia results from a dysfunction in how people process their thoughts
• Family dysfunction


  Problems in the way families of people with schizophrenia interact, which over time has resulted in the expression of schizophrenia
• Schizophrenogenic mother


  A mother who is believed to create schizophrenia in her child