Author: Ugochukwu Ibekwe Valentino
Affecting about 30 million people worldwide, schizophrenia has been a leading health challenge. Schizophrenia is been responsible for over 15,000 deaths per year worldwide. Research must be accelerated toward discovering an adequate treatment for this devastating disease.
Schizophrenia is a type of neurodevelopmental disorder which is characterized by a prolonged disorder called psychosis. In psychosis, patients exhibit several symptoms such as problems in maintaining relationships with people, deficits in emotion and expression, hallucinations, and delusional reasoning. In a schizophrenic person, the above symptoms are prolonged manifesting over months and years. Schizophrenia impacts the quality of life of sufferers.
Essential information about schizophrenia
• There are two major classifications of symptoms associated with schizophrenia. They are the:
• Positive symptoms: they are prevalent in schizophrenic people. They are the main manifestations of psychosis and include hallucinations (e.g vision, auditory), delusional thinking, confusion and social withdrawal.
• Negative symptoms: they are poor manifestations of normal psychological functions. They include lacking emotions, poor speech and difficulty in finding pleasurable experiences.
• there is no single explanation for schizophrenia. Studies have demonstrated that heritability and environmental factors have major roles they play in the disease. A highly genetically disposed individual might not develop the disorder if other factors are not substantial. Environmental risk factors include developmental influences such as prenatal metabolic stress, nutritional deficiencies substance use, traumatic experience, and social and economic influences.
• Schizophrenia is characterized by a progressive nature which begins in early adulthood. It is rare to have children afflicted with psychosis or diagnosed with schizophrenia. It manifests in varying degrees amongst people and there are intervals of relapse. Although common assumptions tell that schizophrenic people are harmful and antisocial, conclusions from examinations show that patients are not inclined to be violent although aggression could be displayed by some patients.
• Men are more likely to be diagnosed with schizophrenia than women. There is found a reduction in life expectancy in patients. Schizophrenia does not by itself cause death but can cause an increase in heart disease and complications, substance abuse, depression and suicidal thoughts.
Schizophrenia is indeed a common mental issue of which its nature is not clearly understood. In my next article on schizophrenia, we shall look deeper into how schizophrenia manifests, how it is diagnosed, several social aspects of schizophrenia and how it can be successfully treated.
