Schizophrenia-It is what schizophrenia?

Schizophrenia

It is what schizophrenia?

Schizophrenia is a psychosis, i.e. a disease where the individual lost any contact with reality and is not thus aware to suffer from a mental disorder

The schizophrenia term comes from the Greek skhizô, “I divide” and “phrên”, spirit. It indicates all the mental states which present like essential character the rupture of the psychic unit of the subject. This results in a dissociation between the idea, the behavior, and the emotional content contents normally in a harmonic way in the same moment (example: to tell the death of a close relation while laughing).

This pathology touches 1% of the population, with a light preference for the boys. The majority of the cases appear between 15 and 35 years.

In addition to this card, lira also our file: To know to detect a schizophrenia.

Which are the symptoms of a schizophrenia?

The psychiatrists index two great types of symptoms in this disease:

> Symptoms related to is delirious, known as “positive”:
For example of the delirious ideas of persecution, the auditive hallucinations, the anguishes of body transformations, the crises of agitation.

> Symptoms known as “negative” which are related to a fall of the physical and psychic capacities:
For example a tendency to the return to oneself and social withdrawal to take refuge in an interior world; difficulties of concentration, attention and an impoverishment of the speech.

According to the symptoms presented by the patients, there would exist at least seven clinical forms of schizophrenia. Thus, the psychiatrists prefer to rather use the term “schizophrenias” in the plural than in the singular.

Seven principal forms of schizophrenia

1 – Simple schizophrenia. The negative symptoms are in the foreground: impoverishment of the socio-professional relations, tendency to insulation and the autistic fold in an interior world. There is little or not delirious symptoms.
This form evolves slowly but very often to a more and more marked deficit.

2 – Paranoid schizophrenia. It is the most frequent form of schizophrenia. Is delirious dominates the clinical picture and generally answers the antipsychotic treatments.

3 – Hebephrenic schizophrenia. The dissociation of the psychic unit of the subject is prevalent. It is the form most resistant to the therapeutic ones.

4 – Catatonic schizophrenia. The patient is like fixed physically and preserves the attitudes that one imposes to him, like a wax headstock. He is locked up in a dumbness or always repeats the same sentences. Currently, this form is treated and been thus seldom final.

5 – Dysthymic schizophrenia. The acute accesses have the characteristic to be accompanied by depressive symptoms, with suicidal risk, or contrary to symptoms maniacs. These forms answer at least partly the treatments by lithium.

6 – Pseudonevrotic schizophrenia. It associates symptoms of schizophrenia and important symptoms of neurosis (hysterical, phobic, anxious or obsessional).

7 – The pseudo-psychopathic or “heboidophrenic” shizophrénie. It very coexists of the passages to the act violent one and the dissociative symptoms like a great emotional coldness.

How does a schizophrenia begin?

The beginning can be brutal by a first delirious episode. But it can be more insidious with a decline in the activity of the subject and a fall of the school or professional level. It can also be a question of a progressive modification of affectivity and personality, or of an attraction for strange activities, or progressive social insulation or behavioral problems.

A disease with the multiple causes

There would be three great types of risk factors: génético-biological, environmental early (like complications with the birth or an infection during the pregnancy), and environmental late (like the consumption of cannabis or certain family communication difficulties).

These three types of risk factors would support occurred of the disease while acting in an independent way but also between them. The psychiatrists develop since about thirty year this concept of multifactorielle vulnerability with schizophrenia, rather than to consider a biological whole or a psychoéducatif whole.

The treatment of the disease is multidisciplinary

> Drugs: the nerve sedatives, which act at the cerebral level on the neuro-transmitters implied in schizophrenia (dopamine, serotonin)

> Psychotherapeutic.

> Social: a great importance is given to the assistance measures with socio-professional insertion

Evolution of the disease

All can be seen since a socio-professional and family insertion of quality until an complete absence of independence. In the most serious forms, the maintenance with life in a psychiatric institution can prove to be necessary.

Some figures
25% of the patients would evolve to a cure, 25% towards a serious form of the disease and
50% would have an intermediate form with a variable repercussion on the socio-professional and family fields.

To retain

Schizophrenia is a disease of the brain which affects the thought severely, the emotional life and the general behavior of that which in is reached.
The diagnosis even of schizophrenia is not obvious because this disease is probably not a unit disorder and that we do not know clearly the causes of them. Currently, there do not exist examinations which make it possible to pose diagnoses it schizophrenia with certainty.
The future of the patients depends much on the environment sociofamilial and the precocity of the assumption of responsibility.
It is advisable to go to consult a psychiatrist in the event of which has occurred, in a teenager or a young adult, several of the symptoms evoked in this card. This is all the more true if there exists, in the family, other people reached of psychiatric disorders.