Schizophrenia

5 Pages 1126 Words

Schizophrenia 3

Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a very serious disease that knows no shape, size, gender, or color. Schizophrenia is characterized by profound disruption in cognition and emotion, affecting the most fundamental human attributes: language, thought, perception, affect, and sense of self (Spearing 2004). Having no single definitive symptom makes it hard to diagnose and even harder to live with. Schizophrenia can be draining on both the person with the illness and their families. The mental, physical, and financial strain it imposes can cripple even the strongest of people. Though it is not exploited as much as AIDS and Cancer, schizophrenia is out there, and it is a disease that everyone should be aware of and have a healthy fear of.
Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that is basically a loss of contact with reality. When a person’s thinking, feeling, and behavior is so far from normal and interferes with their ability to function in everyday life, then he or she has a mental illness called schizophrenia (Papolos 1997). Schizophrenia is typically characterized as a separation between the thought process and emotions (Myers 2003). However, trying to define schizophrenia is like trying to hit a moving target. The disorder can distort reality and cause delusions as well as hallucinations. Schizophrenia is a brain disease, meaning that there should be a way to cure it, however, that cause has not been found yet (Papolos 1997). The tough thing about schizophrenia is the exact cause of it is still unknown by scientist. The only thing they are certain of is that schizophrenia has more than one cause.
Scientist believe that like heart disease schizophrenia may result from an interplay of genetic and environmental factors (Hattfield 1998). Though they are yet to understand all of the factors necessary to produce schizophrenia, all the tools of modern biomedical research are being used to search for genes...