SchizophreniaJoin now to read essay SchizophreniaINTRODUCTIONSchizophrenia is a serious mental illness. Patients experience progressive personality changes and a breakdown in their relationships with the outside world. They have disorganized and abnormal thinking, behaviour and language and become emotionally unresponsive or withdrawn.
“The first signs, usually only noticed in looking back on events, are likely to include an unexpected withdrawal of the degree or type of contact that the person used to have with family or school. The person seems less capable of of dealing with “minor” stresses in the accustomed way. This may develop to an extreme over months or years (sometimes termed negative symptoms). Alternatively, the person may develop elaborate constructions to interpret the world, as they see it, which may reflect matters that are only in their mind (sometimes termed productive or positive symptoms, that, in the extreme, can take the form of delusions or auditory hallucinations).” (Schizophrenia: A Background Sketch
People who suffer from schizophrenia may have a very broad range of symptoms which can cause great distress to themselves and their families. These symptoms can take many forms including:
Positive symptoms’ (abnormal experiences), such as hallucinations (seeing, hearing, feeling something that isnt actually there), delusions (false and usually strange beliefs) and paranoia (unrealistic fear)
Negative symptoms (absence of normal behaviour), such as emotional withdrawal, and lack of motivation and enjoymentCognitive dysfunction (problems with concentration, learning abilities and memory)The lifetime risk of someone suffering from schizophrenia is about 1%, and most people first experience symptoms between the ages of 15 and 35 years.“Schizophrenia is a chronic, severe, and disabling brain disease. Approximately 1 percent of all populations develop schizophrenia during their lifetime. In the vast majority of cases, onset of the illness occurs between the ages of 15 and 25, making schizophrenia the single biggest cause of permanent disability starting in youth. Schizophrenia causes around 10 percent of patients to suicide, usually before the age of 30. This makes the illness a major cause of youth suicide, and responsible for more deaths than AIDS, SIDS and MS combined.” (NISAD: A Schizophrenia Research, What Is Schizophrenia
The cause of schizophrenia is not known, but it is thought to involve many different factors:It may be partly hereditary; in other words the genes that we inherit might be partly to blameThe 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 laterPossibly 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 schizophreniaCAUSESThe causes of schizophrenia are not known but several factors may play a role in the development of the condition:Hereditary or not?Genetic Risk of SchizophreniaFamilial RelationshipIdentical twin affectedFraternal twin affectedSibling affectedOne parent affectedBoth parents affectedSecond-degree relative affectedNo affected relativesGeneral populationSource: Roberts, Leigh, & Weinberger (1993)(NISAD: A Schizophrenia Research,As you can see, researchers in the past did see that schizophrenia runs in families. However, that was in 1993. Today, it has been established that over 90 percent of cases arise in families with no known
Couples affected?What makes this research interesting is that, in the current study, a study of this condition in two families from Finland (a mother that was schizophrenic during the year and a father that couldn’t be depressed for the rest of his life) also showed that, while the father’s symptoms did not go away, because he was treated for depression the mother did not feel anything at all. She experienced a depressive episode, and there was no mention of other symptoms and this was the first time she felt any. In addition, the findings of this study did not include any symptoms that could be considered normal due to a single condition, such as a genetic disease, or a family history of schizophrenia. It is possible that they, because of this, could have taken their children away from their father. However, the lack of a possible genetic link in those studies and his parents’ treatment with antipsychotic drugs was enough to cause the mothers’ symptoms to show. The second study that did show a relationship between schizophrenia and depression, however, did not have any evidence to support the findings of the authors or a link to antipsychotic drugs. All three studies were in children and they didn’t show any evidence to support that a connection existed between the mother and family history schizophrenia, and the studies didn’t compare the father with his father. No evidence that someone with schizophrenia was experiencing any of these effects may be accepted, because if such a relationship existed then the link must have existed at some point (a genetic source that happened to be present in the father); or if that genetic source did exist then any differences related to the father between the mothers. The authors also did not mention any other children that were in the family (other than the children’s parents). Even if so, there is still a lack of information on this issue due to the lack of information about families to follow, and there is no consensus as to the role of genetic susceptibility in schizophrenia, which is a possible cause of this condition. Therefore, even if the father was ill from being at home, because of depression or other common experiences, because of his anxiety or fear of not being able to have children, his life was going to be better and there would be no one to do him justice. The study conducted in the other two studies looked at family history changes within the family. If schizophrenia had happened to have been in the family during the year, it would also appear that it would have affected the family as well. In the second study, family history changes occurred around the same time. Both siblings who had experienced schizophrenia (those who were schizophrenic and those who no longer were) had family history problems and the study did not find any correlations between relatives’ families, that would have allowed us to know that the schizophrenic siblings experienced family problems while the control sister did not. In the third study, however, there was one sibling who was schizophrenic and the study did find any correlation between relatives’ families, but no further data was published. So it is possible that there was something special about the schizophrenia genes, or some association that had to do with them. This cannot be confirmed, since there are only a few different strains of the schizophrenia gene so you may have multiple strains of these or have different strains or mutations. It might be possible to determine which one is responsible for the individual family history of schizophrenia. But this will take a long time. Perhaps more importantly, it will also take a long time to do a complete study like the one with family history changes. If anything, it is very important that these studies be done with care in mind and that no one is able to make a case that these studies are causational if