Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a psychological disorder (or grouping of psychological disorders) where a person looses touch with reality. It is a chronic and debilitating disorder meaning “split mind” in Greek. This disorder is shown through the patient’s impaired reasoning, violent behavior, and emotional instability. Also, hearing voices, having hallucinations, and delusions are common. Many with schizophrenia are convinced people like the FBI, God, or aliens are telling them to act in certain ways. Being unable to complete thoughts or ideas is another symptom of schizophrenia. People who are schizophrenic cannot decipher signals from the outside world and see objects for things very different than what they are. There are many different symptoms shown by schizophrenics.

Untreated, people who have schizophrenia will slowly leave the normal world and enter into their own reality. There is medication to treat these patients, but sometimes hospitalization or psychotherapy is needed. Schizophrenia is argued by many psychologists to be caused by hereditary reasons, chemical imbalance, or viral infection. It is usually diagnosed between the ages 17-35 and approximately affects 1% of the population. There are no tests to take to see if one is schizophrenic, but by observing a patient doctors can diagnose this after ruling out all other options.

Schizophrenia is an interesting disorder because it is experienced by everyone differently. Although some symptoms are shared all, each patient has his/her own story. While we now with modern science and technology can understand how some disorders work, we cannot understand how people with Schizophrenia view the world. Since every patient has different symptoms we could never get a broader view on how exactly it feels to have this disorder.

Author: Olivia Hawkinson