Schizophrenia is a psychotic disorder. Sufferers of schizophrenia lose touch with reality have difficulty expressing themselves in an appropriate way and fail to realise they have a problem.. Schizophrenia is characterised by a profound disruption of cognition and emotion, which affects a person’s thought, perception, emotion, sense of self, social relationships and psychomotor behaviour
The term schizophrenia represents a group of disorders and there are thought to be 5 main ones that the DSM identifies
Disorganised
Catatonic
Paranoid
Undifferentiated
Residual
Schizophrenia is the most common and best known psychotic disorder. In most countries across the world, the lifetime risk is 1% in over 18’s, it usually develops in early adult life between the ages of 15- 45. Men and women are equally affected although men tend to develop it about 5 years earlier.
Positive symptoms of schizophrenia include;
Delusions which are bizarre beliefs that feels real.
Paranoia in nature, they believe that behaviour and comments of others are meant for them even from TV.
They may suffer experiences of control such as an alien invasion, spirits or radio transmitters. Hallucinations bizarre unreal perception of environment usually auditory but can be visual or olfactory (smells) or tactile (feelings such as bugs crawling over or under skin). Disordered thinking thoughts have been withdrawn or inserted from mind they tends to demonstrate loosely associated speech.
These are an addition to the person’s behaviour whereas negative symptoms involve losses of emotion, interests, pleasure etc. Negative symptoms can be a reduction in the range and intensity of emotional expression, Alogia poverty of speech and avolition which is a reduction of or inability to initiate and persist in goal directed