Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness affecting around one percent of the population. The mental disorder is characterized by delusions along with paranoia. The illness starts to show symptoms throughout a person’s young adulthood. Schizophrenia greatly affects the lives of those who suffer from it along with their families, such as mine.
A person suffering from the disorder will often experience stress and delusions throughout their teenage years and adulthood. Common symptoms of schizophrenia are hallucinations, paranoia, disorganized behaviour, the inability to make rational decisions, along with difficulty in dealing with emotions and social interactions. There are three subtypes of schizophrenia, the paranoid type, the disorganized type, and the catatonic type. Victims of paranoid schizophrenia experience hallucinations and delusions, but don’t suffer from disorganized behavior and are more able to think rationally. Disorganized schizophrenia is characterized by thought disorder and disorganized behaviour. The catatonic type includes episodes of behavior varying in a extreme spectrum. Coma-like dazes and slowed motor skills are another symptom of this subtype.
There are numerous causes for schizophrenia, making each and every case different. The main causes of the illness are genetic, substance abuse, prenatal problems, and complications in brain structure. The most likely way to develop schizophrenia is by being directly related to a person with the disease. Almost half of all schizophrenics abuse drugs or alcohol. Drugs such as cocaine, amphetamines, and most notably cannabis, have been linked to causing psychosis and schizophrenia. Stressful experiences in the prenatal period like malnutrition, drug abuse, and exposure to a viral infection can increase the risk of developing the disorder. Lack of activity in the frontal lobe of the brain causes the poor decision making in disorganized schizophrenics. Schizophrenia has showed to decrease the amount of brain tissue over time. Experts still have not found the exact cause of schizophrenia, but have narrowed down the causes which increase susceptibility to the disorder.
People with schizophrenia often have problems relating to or socializing with others. The disorder has had a dark history due to misunderstanding along with ineffective and unethical treatments. The first attempts of treating of schizophrenia were the creation of asylums. Insulin and electric shock therapy were the next treatments to be experimented with throughout the 1930’s, both of which were very unsuccessful. The discovery of destroying nerve fibers by injecting alcohol into the frontal lobe to cut off emotional function was made by Portuguese doctor Egus Moniz in 1930. The procedure was later perfected by an American neurologist, Walter Freeman. Freeman would hammer an ice pick like tool called an orbitoclast into the frontal lobe via the eye socket and sever the nerve fibers. The transorbital lobotomy gained popularity as a treatment for schizophrenia because it left patients with dulled emotions and was cost effective. The use of the lobotomy declined in the 1950’s as it was found to cause patients to die from epilepsy as well as cause brain damage. Since then antipsychotic medications have been developed and cases of full recovery are becoming more and more occurrent.
Schizophrenia causes many difficulties and hardships in the lives of those who suffer from it, for obvious reasons. It can take patients years to find the right balance of medication and get on the road to recovery. Thankfully modern science is making medical advances in the treatment of this affliction that the earlier experiments of the twentieth century could not. Roughly one third of schizophrenic patients make a complete recovery and experience no further psychotic episodes. Hopefully through further research, a cure for schizophrenia can be found.
By Joe Woywitka
Sources Cited: http://schizophrenia-blog.blogspot.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia
http://medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/schizophrenia
Joe this could have been much more powerful if you included some of Roland's story.
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