Psychology of Schizophrenia and its Symptoms
Psychology of Schizophrenia and its Symptoms
For many years the word “schizophrenia” has provoked enormous discomfort. Invested with meaning at once surreal and feared, it is still used as an instrument of ridicule in ordinary conversation, in the media, and even among professionals themselves. The word itself is ominous and evokes visions of madness and asylums. It is a discordant and cruel term, just like the disease signifies. “Schizophrenia continues to be an illness about which the public at large remains unaware even though, along with other psychiatric disorders, it has become more susceptible to modern scientific investigation yielding information that has clarified the origin, progress, and outcome of the disorder” (Orey). Brilliant advances in brain and behavioral research over the last couple of decades have armed scientists and clinicians to such a degree that both diagnosis and therapeutics now rest on more solid ground than ever before.
“Schizophrenia is a complex disorder characterized by a constellation of distinctive and predictable symptoms that are most commonly associated with the disease. It is one of the most disabling and emotionally devastating illnesses known to man” (Orey). It is a relatively common disease with an estimated one percent to one and a half percent of the United States population being diagnosed with it over the course of their lives (Torrey 6). Schizophrenia usually begins by the individual having a “psychotic episode”, which is a serious onset of symptoms. The symptoms are divided into two main categories, positive and negative. Positive because these are new experiences and negative because these are every day parts of life, at a reduced level. These may occur together, separately or alternately. The positive symptoms are hallucinations, delusions, disorganized speech. Most commonly a person with schizophrenia will “hear” his own thoughts, for example, as if they have been spoken aloud within his head. The thoughts can appear to be so loud that the person may believe that people nearby will also be able to hear them. The mind usually adjusts to this very rapidly and as a result the thoughts then appear to come from some external source. These spoken thoughts are then called voices or, more technically, hallucinations. There can also be other kinds of hallucinations such as visual, smell or taste. A person who experiences hallucination will naturally attempt to find an explanation for what is happening. Which kind of explanation they decide on depends very much...