You’re walking down the crowded school hallway, worrying about your assignment that is due, when all of a sudden you are jumping off of the Eifel Tower being chased by polar bears as you shoot down flying goldfish with your laser gun. You and I know things like this are impossible, but for some people that live in a shattered reality, things like this happen all the time. These people suffer from one of the most complex psychological disorders called schizophrenia. Schizophrenia distorts a person’s emotions, thoughts, and behavior causing them to pull away from reality and live in their own chaotic fantasy.
Schizophrenia’s symptoms are classified as either negative or positive symptoms. Positive symptoms are hallucinations, delusions, and extremely chaotic speech and behavior. Hallucinations are false perceptions. People with hallucinations taste, hear, feel, see, and smell things that others around them are not encountering. Most hallucinations are visual or with voices and seem intensely real to the person experiencing them. Delusions are false beliefs that the person believes no matter how much evidence there is to disprove it. Negative symptoms of schizophrenia are enervation, social withdrawal, lethargy, and alogia.
Enervation is feeling drained or having no energy. Social withdrawal is pulling away from others and avoiding relationships. Lethargy is being without enthusiasm or energy. Alogia is when a person produces little to no speech. When the negative symptoms are all combined they produce something called the flat effect. No matter how emotional an experience is a person will respond in an emotionally “flat” way. They will show no emotions or facial expressions and their speech will be extremely monotone. To be diagnosed with schizophrenia, a person must show signs of at least two of these symptoms for a month or longer.
One of the symptoms a person has must be a positive symptom like hallucinations, delusions, or jumbled speech and thought. In a study done by Andreasen and Flaum, eighty-one percent of the people with schizophrenia had delusions. Fifty-eight percent had hallucinations, and only twenty-two percent had disorganized thoughts. For negative characteristics, eighty-five percent experienced apathy. Sixty percent of the people experienced the flat affect, and only thirty percent had alogia. Culture can vary schizophrenia greatly. Delusions, for example, can have completely different themes depending on where the person lives.
In Nigeria and Ghana, many delusions were based on being an angel or a prophet because this is a major part of their culture. Over time, the major theme for that culture can change depending on how the culture changes. In the U. S. , patients were studied over the years. During World War II, most delusions’ themes involved Nazi soldiers. Now in the twenty-first century, most delusions involve technology in some sort of way. A person’s culture can also affect how a person deals with schizophrenia and what quality of life they can have. On average the onset of schizophrenia happens between the age of eighteen and twenty-five.
Every person’s experience with schizophrenia varies incredibly, but there are some observations that we can make about schizophrenia patients as a whole. A quarter of the people with schizophrenia are lucky; they have a random schizophrenic episode, recover quickly, and never have another again. Another quarter has reoccurring episodes but can live a mostly normal life. Sadly, about half of the people with schizophrenia are classified as having a chronic mental illness. These people suffer to live a normal life, and some even struggle in completing daily routines.
They are constantly being hospitalized and always in need of continuous treatment, so chronic schizophrenia is an excessive emotional, financial, and psychological difficulty for themselves, their families, and society. A person’s society can also influence how they deal with schizophrenia. Surprisingly, even though they aren’t able to obtain mental health services and medication, people in third world countries are more likely to manage their schizophrenia better than people from developed countries. It is believed that people from third world countries are more likely to accept a person’s illness.
They also having a stronger and larger family to help care for the victims of this harsh mental disease. The World Health Organization found in a study that only three percent of Americans that suffered from a single schizophrenic episode recovered while fifty-four percent of Indians had a full recovery. People in third world countries experience fewer symptoms over time, but they seem to struggle to live independently or hold a job. It is the complete opposite for people in developed worlds. They can live more independent lives with their own jobs, yet they experience more symptoms and have more episodes.
It is very obvious that culture is a major influence in the lives of people with schizophrenia. Not only are the symptoms of schizophrenia complex, the causes of schizophrenia are also very diverse. Schizophrenia tends to group in certain families proving that genetics plays a major role in many cases. Scientists originally thought it was only genetics that was involved in schizophrenia, but they found out that was not true when they did a study with identical twins. In theory, if genetics was the only factor in schizophrenia, both identical twins would have to have it because their genes are identical.
They found in their studies that only in half of all the sets of twins did both twins have it, so if a person has schizophrenia, their twin only has a fifty percent chance of having it proving that genetics is not the only factor. Schizophrenia is an extremely complex mental disease. Genetic factors, paternal age, immune system, abnormal brain structures and chemistry, and psychological factors can all be causes of schizophrenia. Paternal age is a factor because as the male ages, his chances of having genetic mutations in his offspring increase.
Dolores Malaspina did a study in 2001 and found that man between the age of forty-five and forty-nine has twice as much of a chance to have children with schizophrenia than a man that is twenty-five or younger. A man that is over fifty triples his chance of having children with schizophrenia. Overall, about a quarter of the cases of schizophrenia studied by Malaspina were accredited to paternal age. There is a theory that an influenza virus during prenatal development or soon after birth. Some scientists are not exactly sure why this is, but this theory is still being studied.
Brain structure plays a big part in schizophrenia. Though scientists are not exactly sure why, swollen ventricles, or fluid-filled cavities in the brain, are associated with schizophrenia. Most patients also have a loss in the gray matter of their brain which increases their symptoms and lowers their thinking skills. A very contradictory theory is that dopamine in the brain increases a person’s schizophrenic symptoms. There is both evidence for and against this theory. Family lifestyles can induce schizophrenia. A child growing up under harsh or guilt-inducing parenting can suffer from more mental issues.
Most of the time when a person has schizophrenia more than one of these causes is involved. There are five different types of schizophrenia: paranoid, disorganized, catatonic, residual, and schizoaffective. Paranoid schizophrenia is when a person is constantly in fear. They are very suspicious of people and sometimes have the fear that someone is watching them. Disorganized schizophrenia is when a person has irrational or delirious speech and thoughts, but they do not actually have delusions. A person who suffers from catatonic schizophrenia is very introverted and uncommunicative.
Generally, these people put themselves in extremely odd and distorted body positions. Residual schizophrenia is when a person does not experience hallucinations or delusions anymore, but they are very depressed and lethargic in their outlook on life. A person who suffers from schizoaffective schizophrenia has more than one mental disorder. These people usually suffer from things like depression or bipolar disorder along with having schizophrenia. Schizophrenia affects one percent of the world population. That is about one out of every one hundred Americans or 2. 5 million Americans.
Sadly, there is no cure for this complex mental disorder, but there are treatments and medications that can help relieve a person of some of their sufferings. Some people are even able to live a normal life with the right treatments. Treatments include things like individual or family therapy and social skills training. Medications that can help schizophrenic patients are antipsychotics like chlorpromazine and asenapine. The more doctors and psychiatrists study this intricate disorder and all its causes and influences, the more likely people are to be able to live a more normal life with this terrible mental disorder in the future.
