Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that generally appears in late adolescence or early adulthood,  however, it can emerge at any time in life. It is one of many brain diseases that may include delusions, loss of personality (flat affect), confusion, agitation, social withdrawal, psychosis, and bizarre behavior. This definition is from What is Schizophrenia?.  This disorder is a psychotic disorder.  This means that a person may have lost the ability to tell what is real and what is not.  Often some of the symptoms include visual and auditory hallucinations, delusions, impossible ideas, disorganized thinking and languages,  catatonic behavior is when there are episodes of extreme opposite behaviors at complete ends of the behavior spectrum, flat affect, alogia this is a poverty of speech, and avolition is a lack of all motivation. Schizophrenia can be diagnosed in people as early as the age of seven while others it takes a while for the symptoms and diagnosis to come around.  Each person is different and will not have all of the symptoms at one time.  They come in stages and sometimes will get progressively worse as the person gets older.

This picture shows what a person with schizophrenia sees.  They will see people in their minds and think that they are standing in the room with them.  They will have actual conversations with these 'people'.  A lot of the time these other 'people' will change a person's personality.  Sometimes with schizophrenia it is misdiagnosed as multiple personality disorder.  This is because of the fact that the other 'people' living in the body of one person will take over that person's body and make them do something they would never normally do.

 

The treatments for schizophrenia are just some antipsychotics to help curb them from seeing they people in their minds. There are also psychosocial interventions which are therapy sessions with family or groups to help the person get used to having interaction with people in real life.