Schizophrenia

• What is schizophrenia?

• Symptoms

• Treatment

What is schizophrenia?

Schizophrenia is a diagnosis given to some people who have severely disrupted beliefs and experiences.  However many people diagnosed with schizophrenia and some professionals dispute whether there is such a condition.

During an episode of schizophrenia, a person's experience and interpretation of the outside world is disrupted - they may lose touch with reality, see or hear things that are not there and act in unusual ways in response to these 'hallucinations'. An episode of schizophrenia can last for several weeks and can be very frightening.

Schizophrenia can affect men and women from all countries, cultures, backgrounds and walks of life. About 1 in 100 people will have one episode, and two-thirds of these will go on to have further episodes. Schizophrenia usually starts in the late teens or early twenties, but can also affect older people for the first time.

The causes are unknown but episodes of schizophrenia appear to be associated with changes in some brain chemicals. Stressful experiences and some recreational drugs are thought sometimes to trigger an episode.

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Symptoms

Doctors describe two groups of symptoms in people with schizophrenia - positive and negative. Positive symptoms are abnormal experiences and negative ones are loss of normal behaviour. Although the positive symptoms are often the most dramatic and, at least initially, the most distressing, it is usually the negative ones that cause the most problems, as these tend to be longer lasting.

Positive symptoms

The three main positive symptoms are:

• feelings of being controlled by outside forces (i.e. having one's thoughts and actions taken over)
• hearing, seeing, smelling or feeling things which are not there (hallucinations)
• unusual beliefs (delusions).

The delusions can often be very frightening, with the person believing, for example, that others are plotting to kill them or that their conversations are being recorded. Positive symptoms all tend to occur during acute episodes and can be particularly frightening.