The disease that will be discussed, of course, is heard. But few know exactly how it manifests itself in those who prefer the games of the mind to reality. Yes, we are talking about schizophrenia. Not everyone watched the movie "Mind Games" about a Nobel laureate who suffered precisely from this mental illness. Still for acquaintance with the main signs of schizophrenia, you can read the book "The Night is Tender" by Fitzgerald. The film is about a man, the book is about a woman. Men get sick more often and their prognosis is worse.
Symptoms of schizophrenia are divided into three large groups: negative, positive and cognitive. According to one symptom, no one makes a diagnosis, in addition, some of them are also characteristic of other conditions, for example, depression or anxiety disorder.
The negative are not directly related to the prognosis of the disease. However, they are really very undesirable, because eliminating them is extremely difficult. The negative symptoms of schizophrenia are signs that indicate a lack of qualities that are characteristic of healthy people. For example, a person ceases to set goals for himself at work and at school, his emotions and desire to communicate with others disappear, his sense of need for personal hygiene disappears, a person may stop cooking for himself regularly and forget to eat.
The positive symptoms of schizophrenia are also not particularly good. The name means that the patient has symptoms that the healthy do not have. For example, hallucinations. Often the patient hears what others do not hear, sometimes these are voices, sometimes just noises. Votes can discuss the patient’s personality, actions, and advice. Moreover, a person perceives them as something foreign to himself, and not his inner voice. In some cases, visual hallucinations occur. Sometimes patients also feel or smell something that is not.
This behavior suggests an obsession. One priest working in a psychiatric hospital said that hallucinations disappear when reading protective prayers from demons. So you can’t blame everything on the violation of metabolic processes in the brain, this is probably not the main reason for schizophrenia. After all, all believers acknowledge that there is an invisible world that can influence us spiritually.
However, back to the positive symptoms. So, in addition to hallucinations, delusional beliefs are characteristic of patients. For example, the fact that they have certain superpowers. Some people think that the government or the police really want to harm them.
Oddities in behavior and emotional expression are often manifested. A person cannot adequately and in time react emotionally. Bizarre movements appear that cannot be explained by body diseases. At the same time, patients describe their sensations as unusual, sometimes they make faces.
Positive symptoms usually begin to appear after negative ones. They can lead to an episode of psychosis. In psychosis, a person becomes unable to distinguish between reality and imagination. In this case, hospitalization is necessary.
The cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia combine cognitive impairment and several others. The patient begins to have memory problems, it is difficult for him to answer open questions and make decisions, often he does not want to complete his thought. Also, a certain fragmentation in thinking is characteristic. In addition, patients come up with new words, this is not the introduction of terms in science, but often illogical and incomprehensible to others around the creation of words.
The causes of schizophrenia are usually associated with heredity. We are promised that soon it will be possible to buy a pharmacy test, spread it with saliva and see if we are prone to this disease. However, not everything is so simple, it is often not genes that are guilty, but violations of the reading of genetic information. Although not all predisposed to the disease fall ill. Often an episode begins after severe stress or a lifestyle change. However, the reasons in each case are a mystery.