Final Project Psychology 1

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder often characterized by abnormal social behaviour and failure to recognize what is real. Common symptoms include false beliefs, unclear or confused thinking, auditory hallucinations, reduced social engagement and emotional expression, and inactivity. A person with schizophrenia often hears voices, experiences delusions and hallucinations and may believe thoughts, feelings and actions are controlled or shared by someone else.

Schizophrenia is a severe, disabling and chronic disorder that affects people. Schizophrenia is diagnosed as a psychotic disorder. This is because a person suffering from schizophrenia cannot tell their own thoughts, perceptions, ideas, and imaginations from the reality. There is continuing debate and research as to whether schizophrenia is one condition or a combination of more than one syndrome that have related features. People suffering from schizophrenia may seem perfectly fine until the time they talk actually talk about they are thinking. People with schizophrenia rely on others for help since they cannot care for themselves of hold a job. There is no cure for schizophrenia, but there is treatment that relieves some of the symptoms. People having the disorder will cope with the symptoms all their lives. There have been cases of people suffering from schizophrenia leading meaningful and rewarding lives. There are five types of schizophrenia namely paranoid, disorganized, residual, undifferentiated, and catatonic schizophrenia. This paper will discuss paranoid schizophrenia.

Paranoid Schizophrenia is a disease that affects the brain in such a way that is distorts reality of those with the disease. Paranoid Schizophrenia is the most common type of Schizophrenia. The symptoms as listed by the Mayo Clinic are as follows:

I was born January 24th in the year 2000. When I was born, I had three older brothers. We lived in an old cozy house in a small town call Forest Grove. My dad, David, had a vision to start his own construction company where He did home remodeling. My mom, Melinda, made it her responsibility to homeschool the four of us from a young age. As I grew up, we moved to an even smaller town call Gaston. It felt like we had just bought five acres of heaven. Some of my favorite thing to do were to ride bikes, shoot 22's, and solve Rubik's cubes.

Undifferentiated schizo. Is usually given when a patient has been exhibiting symptoms of schizophrenia. However, the symptoms do not meet the criteria for diagnosed, catatonic, or paranoid schizophrenia. Undifferentiated is the “not otherwise specified” version of schizophrenia (Schizophrenia, Undifferentiated). Residual schizophrenia is the mildest of all the subtypes. “Individuals who are diagnosed with residual schizophrenia are often in a transitional stage of the disorder.” (Residual). Disorganized based on the individuals disorganized behavior, speech, and disturbances in emotional expression (Schizophrenia, Disorganized). Disorganized behavior can be expressed in many ways. Varying from as simple as starting or finishing a small task to as major as not being able to function on their own. Catatonic Schizophrenia involves disturbances in a person’s movement, exhibit a dramatic reduction in activity, to the point where voluntary movement completely stops (Catatonic). A person with Catatonic Schizophrenia can show considerable physical strength in resistance to repositioning attempts, even though they appear to be uncomfortable. Paranoid Schizophrenia is the most common subtype. Patients are likely to experience paranoid delusions that are unreasonable such as the thought of strangers trying to harm them. Patients with Paranoid Schizophrenia may feel angry and/or

Disorganized catatonic behavior becomes the biggest behavioral influence in schizophrenia. Behavioral patterns of schizophrenic individuals follow voices or individual influences within the mind that influence the individual to partake in ideas, opinions, and a complicated reality. Symptoms and patterns of behavior create an individual with this disorder to act hostile, confused, and possibly even dangerous; brain function is compromised and the emotions and learning capabilities are compromised, the lack of memory becomes present as well. These individuals, who suffer from these symptoms, tend to act bizarre or strange to normal society. People of this disorder act very unusual, make very little sense and tend to have little to no concept of reality. (Vanessa Taylor, 2011) states that schizophrenic patients hold behavioral patterns such as “Strange or irrational statements, jumping from topic to topic, odd language structure, and difficulty expressing thoughts and making decisions are also common schizophrenic behaviors. These behaviors are a result of disordered thinking, one of the primary symptoms of schizophrenia. Disordered thinking can also result in bizarre clothing choices and odd behaviors. Schizophrenics may obviously be unable to concentrate, forget and lose things, or be unable to cope with even minor problems.”

It is a cluster of disorders characterized by disorganized and delusional thinking, disturbed perceptions and inappropriate emotions and behaviors. The clusters of schizophrenia can present as positive or negative symptoms. The positive symptom patients experience hallucinations, talk in disorganized and deluded way and exhibit inappropriate tears or rage. Those with negative symptoms have toneless voices, expressionless faces, or mute and rigid bodies. Schizophrenia has subtypes within it: paranoia (preoccupation with delusions or hallucinations these often have themes of persecution or grandiosity), disorganization (disorganized speech or behavior, or flat/inappropriate behavior), catatonia (immobility, extreme negativity, or repeating another person’s speech or movement), undifferentiated (many and varied symptoms), and residual (withdrawal after hallucinations or delusions have disappeared). Studies have shown that people who suffer from schizophrenia have excess receptors of dopamine in the brain hinting that the symptoms might have biochemical roots. They also have abnormal brain activity in multiple brain

Schizophrenia consists of a broad spectrum of diagnostic criteria (both cognitive and emotional dysfunctions) that cause problems in every day functioning (Barlow et al., 2015). This criteria includes the presence of delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, grossly disorganized/catatonic behaviour, and/or negative symptoms, such as diminished emotional expression (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). The prevalence rate of this disorder is estimated to be in the range of 0.2% to 1.5% in the general population (Barlow et al., 2015).

Paranoid Schizophrenia is the type of mental illness where the patient loses touch with reality. Patients experience delusions, or the belief in things that aren 't real, or don 't have any basis in reality. In other words, the patient often experiences illogical, unrealistic, and apparently meaningless thoughts and imaginings. Symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia greatly affect the patient 's personality and cognition. These symptoms include: anger; the patient may become "irrationally angry, yelling and cursing" (Kinros, Reichenberg & Frangou, 2010) for no apparent reason. Violence is another symptom, which may result from the patient 's irrational anger. Paranoid Schizophrenics can become violent with anyone, family, friends, or stranger. When the patient experiences anger, he does not differentiate between who is a family, friend, or stranger; he is violent with whomever he is angry at. Another symptom is auditory hallucinations; this is where the patient hears voices. These voices may tell the patient to do something that they otherwise might not normally do; or the patient could be having a complete conversation with the voices in his head.

Schizophrenia is a chronic brain disorder that affects more than one percent of the population. When schizophrenia is active, symptoms can include delusions, hallucinations, trouble with thinking and concentration, and lack of motivation. However, when these symptoms are treated properly, a large portion of those diagnosed will greatly improve over time.

Schizophrenia is not yet fully understood, but it is known that it is characterized by extreme disturbances in many vital areas, including behavior, emotions, speech, perception and thinking. The term schizophrenia means

Catatonic Schizophrenia is a specific type of schizophrenia, or brain malfunction, which is distinguished by extreme, yet direct opposite behaviors. Its symptoms focus on movement and motor skills. You might be more familiar with the "catatonic stupor", where the individual is incapable of movement, speech or response to external stimuli.

Schizophrenia is a disorder of varying symptoms, in fact until the current edition of the DSM-V this disorder was broken into subtypes such as catatonic, disorganized, paranoid, undifferentiated, and residual. There many facets of schizophrenia such as auditory hallucinations, delusions, social isolation, as well as intense suspicion or agitation, each of which contributed to the previous subtypes of schizophrenia. Today, individuals with schizophrenia are assessed severity of symptoms rather than by classification.

In some people's cases, Schizophrenia appears suddenly and without warning. But for most it comes slowly, with subtle warning signs and a gradual decline in functioning long before the first severe episode. “In the early phases of Schizophrenia people often seem eccentric, unmotivated, emotionless, and reclusive (Helpguide.org).” They may isolate themselves and not want to participate in daily activities such as playing with their children, going outside, or getting off the couch. They abandon their hobbies and they do not do well in their jobs. “The most common early warning signs of Schizophrenia include: social withdrawal, hostility or suspiciousness, deterioration of personal hygiene, having a flat and expressionless gaze, the inability to cry or express joy, inappropriate laughter or crying, depression, oversleeping or insomnia, odd or irrational statements, forgetfulness or the inability to concentrate, extreme reaction to criticism, and or strange use of words or way of speaking (Helpguide.org).” There are five types of symptoms of Schizophrenia. Positive is a symptom that involves having hallucinations or delusions. Negative is when one shows no emotion or flat behavior. Avolation is when a person shows little interest in whatever they are doing. Cognitive behavior is when you have disorganized speech or memory loss. Catatonic behavior is considered poor functioning such as your voluntary muscles

What is the first thing you think of when you hear the word “Schizophrenia” ? Sadly, most people react with “they’re going to hurt me” or “they’re not normal”. The main cause behind schizophrenia is believed to be that there is two neurotransmitters that have a change in their levels. This causes the person to generally have memory problems, makes them easily agitated, might make them very anxious and they also might not have good emotional responses. The symptoms caused by it are different for everyone, which I will explain later. So today I am going to tell you about Schizophrenia and what it does to people. In my paper, I will enlighten you on the causes of it, the symptoms and the people it affects. I will also tell you how the families