Abnormal Psychology: Schizophrenia Schizophrenia is a group of paranoiac disorders depicted by agitation in thinking, cognition, affect, behavior, and communication that last longer than six months. There is five recognized kind of schizophrenia and they are catatonic, paranoid, disorganized, undifferentiated, and residual.

Illusion, hallucinations, catatonic behavior, and irrationality are some of the elementary symptoms. No solitary characteristic is present in all types of schizophrenia. The source of schizophrenia is unascertained. There are numerous theories to elucidate the outgrowth of this disorder. Genetic factors may play a role, relatives of a person with schizophrenia are more prone to acquire the disorder. Psychological and social circumstances may also play a part in evolvement of this disease.

The term "schizophrenia" refers to one of the most debilitating and baffling mental illnesses known. Though it has a specific set of symptoms, this illness varies in its severity from individual to individual, and even within any one afflicted individual from one time period to another.

Generally, schizophrenia begins during adolescence or young adulthood. Its symptoms appear gradually and family and friends may not notice them as the illness takes initial hold. Often, the young man or woman feels tense, can't concentrate or sleep, and withdraws socially. But at some point, loved ones realize the patient's personality has changed. Work performance, appearance and social relationships may begin to deteriorate."

Antipsychotic or neuroleptic drugs are employed to hold the symptoms of the illness. This group of drugs encompasses the phenothiazines, thioxanthenes, butyrophenones, dihydroindolones, and dibenzoxazepines.

Drug treatment is ceaseless, by reason of the fact that deterioration of symptoms is common when medication is stopped. Psychotherapy may be beneficial in some situations. There is no known impediment of schizophrenia.

SECOND-GENERATION medications for schizophrenia, introduced in the United States in 1990, have brought some benefit to most patients and dramatic improvement to a few, prompting cautious optimism about a better future for the 2 million Americans estimated to have this severe disorder, according to talks at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association (APA)."

Physicians have refined medical treatments, in spite of the fact that the problem is getting the patient to stay on the drugs, which embody numerous side affects. Various alternative medications have been applied for example marijuana is hypothesized to assist schizophrenic's combat their disorder. Schizophrenics should be admitted to hospitals where doctors can be positive they are accurately diagnosed, and make sure they're not hazardous, and can sustain in society. Schizophrenia is apparently the most unfathomed sickness in society today.

In the Book Negative Symptom and Cognitive DeficitTreatment Response in Schizophrenia distinguished experts address the complex issues-issues rarely confronted in empirical studies of patients with schizophrenia -- and controversial research surrounding the assessment of negative symptoms and cognitive deficits in patients with schizophrenia."

The word schizophrenia comes from two Greek word schizo, which means split, and phrenia, which means mind. This does not mean that a person with the disarray has complicated character, but to some extent parts of the mind appears to be functioning separate of each other.

In general, schizophrenia has a dominant impression on thinking and functioning, damaging a person's competence to care for themselves and to react to environs in a civilized manner.

Researchers do not know the specific causes of schizophrenia, though most believe that it is primarily a physical brain disease. Some believe that the neurotransmitter dopamine is involved with the hallucinations, delusions, thought disorders and blunted emotional responses of this mental illness. Most medications prescribed for schizophrenia affect the dopamine levels in the brain at the same time they reduce the extremely painful mental and emotional symptoms." major theory in the cause of schizophrenia is that it grows in the fetal brain. When the fetal brain is being grown and connected in, the nerve cells enlarge, disjoin, and put together connections with each other. The elementary physical flaw in the brains of numerous people affected with the ailment is that obvious nerve cells move to the wrong areas when the brain is first starting to form. This leaves miniature areas of the brain once and for all out of place.

Medication with both dopamine and serotonin blockers have proven much more affective in the repression and calming down of the symptoms of schizophrenia. In schizophrenics there are both positive and negative symptoms. Negative symptoms are those with more inner signs and positive symptoms are those with more exterior or perceptible signs.

Many felt the disease could not be treated.
That's changed in recent decades as scientists have begun to learn what goes wrong in the brains of schizophrenic patients.

Through brain scans and animal studies, researchers are:

Identifying specific brain areas, including the prefrontal cortex, that goes awry in schizophrenia.

Uncovering factors that may contribute to development of the disease.

Revealing how anti-schizophrenia drugs work and how they may be improved."

In the early days of treatment, schizophrenics often braved electroshock remedial treatment that was very agonizing and was of limited good to the well being of the patients.

The basis and essential nature of schizophrenia have challenged researchers for decades. However not long ago, technological progression and fresh discoveries in psychological science, genetics, neurobiology, and affiliated fields have intensely revitalized the rate of this study.

Performance of both working memory and long-term memory tasks revealed disturbed dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activation in schizophrenia, although medial temporal deficits were also present. Some evidence was found for more severe cognitive and functional deficits with verbal than nonverbal stimuli, although these results were mixed."

The primary drug now for the dealing with schizophrenia is Clozaril. This drug has been restored from its form of the 70's and 80's, but has been changed to diminish the side effects. There are numerous techniques people decide on to cure schizophrenia, but there is still no determined cure for the disease.

The predominance of schizophrenia is the same unmindful of gender, race, and civilization. Even though women are just as prone as men to acquire schizophrenia, but women tend to encounter the sickness less seriously, with lesser hospitalizations and more appropriate social functioning in the community. The Symptoms of Schizophrenia generally grow in late adolescence or early adulthood, within the ages of 15 and 30. Much less ordinarily, schizophrenia grows later in life. The ailment may start abruptly, but it generally develops at a leisurely pace over months or years.

The prevalence and impact of mental illness and addictive disorders is generally underestimated the aggregate burden of severe mental illness in our society exceeds $300 billion annually. These illnesses and their associated costs include: Depression/Manic Depressive Illness - $30 billion, Schizophrenia - $30 billion, Drug Addiction - $160 billion, and Alcoholism - $100 billion."

The patient in Schizophrenia starts to give credence to the fact that the people around them are scheming against them and are out to get them. Not only does the abnormality effect the patient psychologically, but also it starts to effect their physical sentiments. The patients can not translate incoming sentiments and can not control their physical sensitivity, this effect the patient's common sense of what to do in every day situations they encounter.

The investigative drug aripiprazole provides effective and safe antipsychotic treatment in patients with chronic schizophrenia, researchers reported here this week at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association (APA). The most important implication of this study is that it shows that aripiprazole is effective in significantly reducing the time-to-relapse as well as the rate of relapse in patients with schizophrenia who are being treated with medication," said lead investigator Teresa Pigott, MD, director of clinical trials in the department of psychiatry at the University of Florida School of Medicine in Gainesville, Florida."

For a person to be diagnosed as a schizophrenic he must encounter a loss of actuality, and that loss must sustain for at least six months. Doctors also have to rule out medicine use, which can yield like demeanor as schizophrenia. Depression, delusional disorders, and nervous character disorder must also be ruled out. The doctor must discover that the person is socially afar as well. The doctor can look at a number of symptoms of schizoid personality.

According to Dr. Andrew J. Cutler, president, Coordinated Research of Florida, Inc. And Clinical Assistant Professor, Department of Psychiatry and behavioral medicine, University of South Florida. Anxiety complicates the management of schizophrenia and makes treatment more difficult."

The first of the symptoms encountered are emotional frigidity, the patient will not crave nor take pleasure from close relationships in addition to being part of a family. The patient will nearly continually decide on unaccompanied activities. The patient will have no urge for sexual experiences. The patient will take place in few if any action. The patient doesn't have friends other than relatives and at last the patient will be unresponsive to adulation or reproach.

Developed by experts on schizophrenia and exhaustively reviewed by APA members, the American Psychiatric Association Practice Guideline for the Treatment of Patients With Schizophrenia provides therapists with a set of patient care strategies that will aid their clinical decision making.

The guideline describes the best and most appropriate treatments available to…