Schizophrenia

12 Pages 3059 Words

from the very broad definition of schizophrenia, to a more controlled approach that meant that less people are now wrongly diagnosed with schizophrenia.

The symptoms of schizophrenia cause suffers problems in several major areas these include: thought, perception, attention, motor behaviour and emotion. Many patients, who are diagnosed with schizophrenia, only have some of the symptoms. Unlike most disorders schizophrenia doesn’t have an essential symptom, which must be present for schizophrenia to be present. The symptoms of schizophrenia can be divided into two categories, positive and negative symptoms.

Positive symptoms include disorganised speech, hallucinations, delusions and bizarre behaviour. Disorganised speech also known has formal thought disorder. It refers to the problems that a patient has in organising speech in a manner the listener can understand. A patients speech can be made difficult because they are incoherent and whilst the patient makes repeated references to central ideas, the images and fragments of thought are not connected. Speech can also become disorganised through loose association or derailment, in which case the patient may have more success communicating to the listener but they have difficulty sticking to one subject. The disorganisation of thought seems more central to schizophrenia than the disorganisation of speech. Many schizophrenics are subject to delusions, holding a belief that the rest of society would simply deem as false. Delusions generally take one of eight forms.

1. Somatic passivity – The patient believes they are the unwilling recipient of bodily sensations administered by an external force.
2. Thought insertion – The patient believes that thoughts that are not their own have been inserted to their head.
3. Thought broadcast – The patient believes their thoughts are being broadcast to others around them.
4. Thought withdrawal – The patient believes that some extern...