Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a mental illness that is categorized as a psychotic illness. I became interested in Schizophrenia because of a non-fiction movie called “A Beautiful Mind” directed by Ron Howard. In this story, John Nash starts seeing three people who are not real during the time when he entered graduate school. He believed the visions that he saw were real, until his wife and doctor of psychology told him that it was not. John also believed that he is working for a U.S. mysterious conspiracy project in secret, and that made him to be persecuted and he was not able to have an ordinary life. Even though after treatment, he still sees non-real visions that never disappeared from his life. However, this movie expressed that Schizophrenia is a brain damaged disorder and some researchers were against this idea. Is schizophrenia really not brain disorder? Then how does it happened? In John’s case, his non-real visions did not disappeared even though he took medical treatment. Is there any other treatment for schizophrenia, or is not treatable?
People who have schizophrenia cannot tell the difference between what is real and what is just an imagination. This happens to 1% of the population and usually starts in early adulthood around 15 to 25 years of age, and usually happens after having a particular stressful time.
Schizophrenia patients usually have these symptoms after they are having a terrible emotional or psychological pain, and feel withdrawn from society. Some patients are usually interested in cults, and isolate themselves from society, such as being secluded in their room with minimum contact with people. Although the possibilities are only a small percentage, genetics plays a role in schizophrenia in their family or their close relatives. As I noted earlier that schizophrenia onset in early adulthood, but they often shows “soft-sign” in their childhood. There are other discoveries about schizophrenia that is noted by Adam Marcus, he says that the patients’ sensory switch boards, at their very earliest time of the disease, is too small and tells why they have such troubles in their life dealing with the situations around them.
Some major treatments for schizophrenia are medications called “antipsychotics”, and they are usually taken with therapy. The main target of medication is to reduce dopamine because there are too much of dopamine activity inside of the patients’ brain. Antipsychotics are a major treatment that is used for most patients, but it may not treat all the symptoms of schizophrenia. Delusions and hallucinations are often reduced, but difficulty of making decision and remembering tend to remain. However the medications work in many ways and it works very differently for each person and usually has some unpleasant side-effects. To develop the medication without side-effects are encouraged in the future. Besides the medication, one very important treatment is the support of family and friends. Since the common symptoms of schizophrenia are that patient’s feeling of withdraw or isolation from society, better family