What is Schizophrenia?

According to the National Institute of Mental Health (2016), schizophrenia is a severe medical illness that affects how people think, feel, and behave. Individuals suffering from schizophrenia appear to have lost touch with reality. Positive and negative symptoms are generically classified as Schizophrenia symptoms.

Positive symptoms are psychotic actions that are not observed in healthy people. Hallucinations, delusions, and thought disorders or disorganized thinking are examples of these (NIMH, 2016). Unreal experiences that affect the visual, tactile, aural, and olfactory senses are referred to as hallucinations. Hearing voices of individuals from time to time is the most prevalent hallucination that occurs in people with schizophrenia. Delusions, on the other hand, refer to firm beliefs held by people who have schizophrenia. These beliefs do not match up to the way other people see the world. For instance, a person with schizophrenia might claim that they are talking to someone on television. Another negative symptom of schizophrenia is disorganized thinking. This means that the things that a person who has schizophrenia might say things that do not make sense to other people.

The negative symptoms are symptoms that involve loss of enjoyment in life. These can include social withdrawal, poor grooming or hygiene, low sex drive, lack of motivation, reduced speaking and reduced expression of emotions via voice tone or facial expression among others (NIMH, 2016). People who have schizophrenia have a general lack of will to interact and prefer to spend the larger part of the day and night on their own. Also, they also a significant reduction of sex drive. For instance, men experience difficulties in achieving erection. Finally, individuals with negative symptoms of schizophrenia have “poverty speech”, and they usually appear to have little interests in conversations.

Reference

NIMH. (2016). Schizophrenia. Retrieved on 7 November from https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/schizophrenia/index.shtml