Mental Illness: Schizophrenia - Assignment Example

Positive Symptoms include delusions and hallucinations because the patient has lost touch with reality in certain important ways. Delusions cause the patient to believe that people are reading their thoughts or plotting against them, that others are secretly monitoring and threatening them, or that they can control other people's minds. Hallucinations cause people to hear or see things that are not there.Disorganized Symptoms include confused thinking and speech, and behavior that do not make sense.

For instance, people with schizophrenia sometimes have trouble communicating in coherent sentences or carrying on conversations with others; move more slowly, repeat rhythmic gestures or make movements such as walking in circles or pacing; and have difficulty making sense of everyday sights, sounds and feelings. Negative Symptoms include emotional flatness or lack of expression, an inability to start and follow through with activities, speech that is brief and lacks content, and a lack of pleasure or interest in life (NAMI, 2006).

Cognitive symptoms - Difficulties attending to and processing of information, in understanding the environment, and in remembering simple tasks. Affective (or mood) symptoms - Most notably depression, accounting for a very high rate of attempted suicide in people suffering from schizophrenia (The Royal College of Psychiatrists, 2004). Other symptoms include social withdrawal, depersonalization (intense anxiety and a feeling of being unreal), loss of appetite and loss of hygiene. CAUSES OF SCHIZOPHRENIAThe causes of schizophrenia are not known.

However, the interplay of various factors are thought to be involved:It may be partly hereditary; in other words, the genes that we inherit might be partly to blame.The other causes of the illness remain unknown, although it is thought that schizophrenia sufferers may have some parts of the brain that have not developed in exactly the normal way.Some believe that something that happens in the womb might cause schizophrenia many years later.Possibly there is an imbalance in the chemicals that the brain uses to send messages from one cell to anotherAn attack can be brought on by stress, although this is not the cause of schizophrenia (AstraZeneca 2003).

HOW IS SCHIZOPHRENIA TREATED?The outlook for sufferers has improved greatly in the last few decades and many people can be treated outside the hospital and live within the community for most of their lives.When someone is first diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia, they are usually treated in the hospital, but many people can then have treatment at home, particularly if they have a supportive family.Treatment includes counseling, social support, and rehabilitation.Antipsychotic medicines are available to treat the worst symptoms of the illness, such as hallucinations, but there is no "cure" at present.

The older standard (‘Typical’) antipsychotic drugs, though effective, are associated with a range of distressing side-effects which can result in constant twitching/fidgeting, writhing, and disjointed movements. However, newer (‘Atypical’) antipsychotic drugs are designed to offer control of symptoms and less of these disabling side-effects.In addition to medical treatment, support from family, friends and healthcare services is also a vital part of therapy (AstraZeneca 2003).