Schizophrenia And Its Effects On Mental Disorders Essay

In this week’s readings chapter twelve is about schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a psychotic disorder in which personal, social, and occupational functioning deteriorate as a result of strange perceptions, unusual emotions, and motor abnormalities. This disorder is very interesting, but also kind of scary to me. They literally end up in their own world, losing contact with reality. With that, they also experience hallucinations or delusions, which can cause them to do abnormal, possibly dangerous actions. These symptoms must last six months or more before the person can be diagnosed with schizophrenia. It will affect 1 out of 100 people in the world during ones lifetime. This disorder, unlike many others, is just as common among men and women,

Schizophrenia is a disorder that lasts a lifetime. The National Institute of Mental Health defines Schizophrenia as “a chronic and severe mental disorder that affects how a person thinks, feels, and behaves (Schizophrenia, 2016).” It goes on to talk about how most people with schizophrenia have lost a sense of reality, and that the symptoms of this disorder are disabling. Lucky, people have had an improved quality of life with the help of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy is better than other therapies to help treat the symptoms of Schizophrenia.

This paper defines schizophrenia from a biological and psychological perspective and also provides treatment to help combat symptoms of schizophrenia. This paper has three important contributions. First, by defining and expanding on schizophrenia from a biological perspective, I can identify the nature related predispositions. After expanding from a biological approach, secondly, I will analyze schizophrenia from a psychological aspect by determining if there is any environment or nurturing externals that can result to schizophrenia. Lastly, I will provide treatment details and also reveal early signs to schizophrenia. This paper is important because schizophrenia is an epic mental disease and it is crucially important to bring awareness to the public of how we can limit the illness. It is unclear whether schizophrenia have only a biological background or psychological background, but what was discovered is that both contribute to schizophrenia. Positive and negative treatment can be combatted undergoing pharmaceutical and psychotherapy,

Schizophrenia is one of the most treacherous brain disorders that affect many people in the world today. It is very difficult for someone to distinguish between what is real and what is not. Most people with this disorder are considered disabled because daily life as a normal person is almost impossible. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, people with schizophrenia may hear voices that other people don’t hear, and they also may think other people are trying to hurt them. Sometimes they don’t make any sense when they talk. Depending on the patient, schizophrenia can vary from mild to severe. There are many symptoms that coincide with schizophrenia. Some of these symptoms include delusions, hallucinations, disordered thinking, and emotional unresponsiveness. There are many risk factors of schizophrenia such as age, gender, intelligence, and culture. Schizophrenia is not considered a psychological disorder, but a brain disease. Some doctors may assume that the brain is not able to process information correctly. A person’s genetics, physiological and social, and their environment may factor in to what can trigger schizophrenia. This is an unfortunate and debilitating disorder, however there are many therapies available to help with this disease.

While some may understand the concept of not having control over a specific disorder, fewer are able to imagine living with a disorder in which an altered perception of reality is created. “Schizophrenia is, in fact, a class of disorders that causes a distortion of reality to occur to its patients and effects the lives of many individuals to this day (Feldman, 2013). While this may fall into the large mix of other mental disorders, it is truly unlike any other because of the creation of an altered reality. Being the complex disorder that schizophrenia is, it is faced with having much controversy, including gender, and creating the necessary treatments used on its patients to help overcome such a mental disorder.

Schizophrenia is a chronic and severe mental disorder characterized by the breakdown of the thought processes, of emotional responsiveness and of contact with reality. The term schizophrenia itself means “fragmented mind.” A person with this disorder has trouble with deciphering between what is “real” and what is “unreal”. (Gur & Johnson, 2006)

Substantial changes are recorded in the prevalence and incidence of the disease from one country to another and between different cultures, but the differences are reduced if strict diagnostic criteria are applied. The core symptoms include difficulty for thought, decreased affection, loss of behavioral or mixed emotions directed by conflicting impulses, and autism. Schizophrenia is characterized by three major types of clinical manifestations: psychotic symptoms, negative symptoms and cognitive impairment. The former include the loss of contact with reality, including false thoughts (delusions) and hallucinations, among others.

Schizophrenia is a life-long disorder that affects about one percent of the population (Mueser & McGurk, 2004). The cause of this mental illness is still unclear. Studies have suggested that Schizophrenia does not arise from one factor but from a combination of genetic, environmental, and social factors (Liddle, 1987). People diagnosed with Schizophrenia struggle to deal with a multitude of symptoms that make it difficult to function (Mueser & McGurk, 2004). Antipsychotic medications are a popular treatment of the symptoms of Schizophrenia (Mueser & McGurk, 2004). Research is constantly being done to develop these medications to enhance the quality of life of those diagnosed with Schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder in which the individual interprets reality abnormally, this means that the person has “Hallucinations, Delusions, Thought disorders (unusual or dysfunctional ways of thinking), Movement disorders (agitated body movements)”, and most importantly “it doesn’t have a cure”, as the National Institute of Mental Health states. If you caused a crime and claim that you have a mental disorder it doesn 't mean that you get a free pass and not have to pay for your crime, it means that if you are found guilty you will need to pay your sentence in a mental facility. "A person may be found guilty except insane if, at the time of the commission of the criminal act, the person was afflicted with a mental disease or defect of such severity that the person did not know the criminal act was wrong," the law states. Manslaughter is, hurting someone with the intention to cause harm, but not death. Murder is, thoroughly plan the murder to happen and is not just because of an intense moment.

Schizophrenia as a Biological Disorder As well as the biological approaches there are physiological, psychological and environmental explanations. New theories of schizophrenia are constantly being developed each having their own advantages and disadvantages. How do we know however, which one is correct? The biological explanation suggests that schizophrenia is produced by an unfortunate combination of genes or is due to physical problems in the brain.

Schizophrenia is the disorder that most closely corresponds to popular concepts of insanity, madness, or lunacy (Nevid, 2006). Nevid (2006) also states that schizophrenia comes from Greek roots meaning “split brain”. There are quite a few people in the United States that have schizophrenia. According to the National Institute of Mental Health approximately 2.4 million American adults or about 1.1 percent of the population age eighteen and older in a given year have schizophrenia (2013). Schizophrenia is found in men more than women. Men also tend to develop the disorder earlier than women and experience more severe cases of the disorder (Nevid, 2006). When being diagnosed with schizophrenia there are phases the doctor will test. These stages are prodromal, active or acute, remission, and relapse (Frese, 2012).

Approximately 22% of the American population suffers from some kind of mental disorder at any given time. (Passer and Smith, 2004) Schizophrenia is one of the most serious of these mental disorders, and there are many different kinds of treatment. While all mental disorders offer diagnosis and treatment challenges, few are more challenging than schizophrenia. It is both bizarre and puzzling, and has been described as “one of the most challenging disorders to treat effectively.” (Passer and Smith, 2004, 534)

(Kalat, 2012). Bleuler used the term as a means of representing a major psychotic illness

Schizophrenia is a complex disorder of the brain, which is incurable but treatable to live a close to a normal life. There are different types of schizophrenia and they each have different symptoms and affect a person's life in different ways.

Throughout psychology today there are six different theoretical models that seek to explain and treat abnormal functioning or behavior. These different models have been a result of different ideas and beliefs over the course of history. As psychology began to grow so did the improvements in research techniques. As a result psychologists are able to explain a variety of disorders in terms of the six different theoretical models. In the movie A Beautiful Mind it follows the mathematician John Nash as he struggles with schizophrenia. It an attempt to explain John Nash’s disorder the six different theoretical models will be looked at, they include biological model, psychodynamic model, behavioral model, cognitive model, humanistic model,