Psychological Disorder of Schizoprenia
Psychological Disorder of Schizoprenia
Schizophrenia is a disease that has plagued societies around the world for centuries. It is characterized by the presence of both positive and negative symptoms. (Positive symptoms-altered behaviors ie excited motor activity, hallucinations, incoherent thoughts and speech, negative symptoms - the lack of behavior ie emotion lack of speech, and lack of emotion. Not all schizophrenic patients will exhibit all of these symptoms. There has been much debate as to the causes of schizophrenia. While some proposed causes that exist today have been proven false ie bad parenting, many still remain. One of the most famous and most debatable is the dopamine hypothesis.
• Kendler & Gruenbert (1984) and Rosenthal et al., (1980) found that although 1% of the population develops sch an individual has a 10% chance of sch occurring if they have the illness in their family (ie parent, child, or sibling) even if a healthy family adopted the relative shortly after birth.
• Holzman & Matthysse (1990) also show that the concordance rates for sch are higher in identical twins (45%) than fraternal twins (10%). However the fact that these concordance rates for sch in identical twins is very low lends more weight on individual experience among people may provoke the development of sch.
• The current view among researchers is that some individuals inherit the potential for sch which may be activated by experience (Gottesman & Bertelsen, 1989).
• Norman & Malla (1993) found that stress may be play a major role in this activation of schizophrenic symptoms among people with this susceptibility. They found thro several studies that exposure to stressors is common prior to a schizophrenic attack.
In the 1950s the anti-schizophrenic drug, chlorpromazine, was accidentally found. Initially it was developed as an antihistamine however scientific study showed that it had a calming effect when it was administered before surgery. It was then suggested that it might have the same calming effect when administered to psychotic patients. This was not the case, moreover it was found to help schizophrenic symptoms, allowing many institutionalized patients to be discharged.
About the same time scientists discovered Reserpine which comes from the snakeroot plant and was used in India for centuries to help those with mental illness. Reserpine was also found to have an anti-schizophrenic effect when administered to patients.
Chlorpromazine...