Schizophrenia Paper

I chose to write my research paper over Schizophrenia. It is a psychological disorder that I have always found fascinating. It is a serious disorder that consumes a person's life and is nearly impossible to control. In this paper, I will talk about the definition of Schizophrenia, the diagnosis of Schizophrenia, Schizophrenia in children, suicide, sexually related characteristics of the disease, sleep disorders caused by the disease, differences in the disease on different ethnicities, and insensitivity to pain.

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.

Schizophrenia is classified as a mental disorder that shows profound disruption of cognition and emotion which affects a person’s language, perception, thought and sense of self. The dopamine hypothesis states that schizophrenic’s neurones transmitting dopamine release the neurotransmitter too easily, leading to the characteristic symptoms of schizophrenia. This hypothesis claims that schizophrenics have abnormally high amounts of D2 receptors; receptors that receive dopamine, therefore resulting in a higher amount of D2 receptors binding to the receptors causing more impulses. Dopamine neurotransmitters play a

Expert’s reason that unevenness in the complicated interconnected chemical responses of the brain connecting the neurotransmitters dopamine and glutamate, and maybe others, performs a part in schizophrenia. Neurotransmitters are elements that permit brain cells to interconnect with each other. Experts are acquiring more about brain chemistry and its connection to schizophrenia. Similarly, in small methods the brains of people with schizophrenia appear diverse than those of healthful people. For instance, fluid-filled holes at the middle of the brain, called ventricles, are greater in certain people with schizophrenia. The brains of people with the disorder similarly manage to have less grey matter, and certain

For the past fifty years treatment of schizophrenia has been marked by its basis on the dopamine hypothesis for schizophrenia. However, this model for the disease and its subsequent treatment have left many patients without relief or help in dealing with this disease which has lead to a search for a better model. The dopamine model lacks the recognition of a whole range of symptoms associated with the disease and therefore can not be an accurate basis for treatment. More recently, there has been a shift to the glutamate hypothesis which has been shown to more accurately characterize the wide range of symptoms experienced by patients living with this disorder as well as the possibility in improvements for drug treatments.

The symptoms of schizophrenia vary, however, they have been categorized as positive, negative, and cognitive symptoms. Positive symptoms may include hallucinations, delusions, and / or thought disorder. Hallucinations normally give a false perception of touch, smell, taste, and / or visit, those with this particular mental disorder often experience auditory hallucinations. Delusions are also a sign of schizophrenia. Open quotations delusions are beliefs that are not part of the person's culture and do not change. Quotation parentheses u.s. Department, print the seas, 2010. These may cause a person that has this disorder, to think or feel as if they are victims in imagine conspiracy. It is also shown that they believe they are being controlled

(2) However, there are some problems with this evidense. Amphetamines only mimic the positive symptoms of schizophrenia. They do not produce any of the negative symptoms. Likewise, anti-psychotic drugs are only affective on the positive symptoms of the disease. There is still some evidense that schizophrenics do posess higher levels of dopamine, however, these increases are only found in the striatum of the brain (7). The striatum is a region of the brain that receives its inputs from and outputs to the cortex. Injury to the striatum results in problems with intiation and control of motor behavior. (9) Also, there is evidence that the prefrontal cortex produces lower levels of dopamine. (4) The prefrontal cortex is involved in the organization and coordination of information to and from the cortex. (7)

Patients with schizophrenia resulted to having antibodies in their systems while the other group did not. (Grison, Heatherton, and Gazzaniga, 2015, p. 521). Other researchers have presented arguments of their being abnormalities in the neural transmitters. (Grison, Heatherton, and Gazzaniga, 2015, p. 521). Dopamine is one neural transmitter researchers have taken a major interest in because medication given to schizophrenics blocking the dopamine transmitters seem to help calm the severity of the symptoms of a wide number of patients. Although doctors are not yet certain of the cause of schizophrenia they are certain of the fact that people with schizophrenia have less brain tissue due to having large ventricles.

While there is no cure for schizophrenia, research is leading to new, safer treatments. Experts also are unraveling the causes of the disease by studying genetics, conducting behavioral research, and by using advanced imaging to look at the brain’s structure and function. These novel approaches hold the promise of new, more effective therapies.

Schizophrenia is a chronic, complex disorder that causes neurotransmitters to disrupt functional circuits within the brain (7). “Approximately 1% of the population worldwide will develop schizophrenia during their lifetime” (6).

Over the years, experiments have produced evidence to suggest that dopamine plays a role in the development of Schizophrenia (Howes, McCutcheon, & Stone, 2015). Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is produced in the substantia nigra and ventral tegmental regions of the brain. The belief that dopamine was involved in Schizophrenia arose after multiple studies performed with compounds produced an increase in extracellular concentrations of dopamine (Lieberman, Kane, & Alvir, 1987). The patients that were administered these compounds had similar symptoms to those observed from patients who were diagnosed with Schizophrenia (Lieberman et al., 1987).

Another major problem with the dopamine theory is that it only takes into consideration a single neurotransmitter and neglect the roles of other neurotransmitters in schizophrenia. The findings are inconsistent where some findings proposed that the abnormality causes the availability of dopamine transporters changed, and effect to the increased or decreased of dopamine level (Fusar-Poli, and Meyer-Lindenberg, 2012), while some other findings suggested that there are other neurotransmitter such as glutamine which involved in excitatory response in the brain has played a role in resulting cognitive deficits of schizophrenia (Stone, Howes, Egerton, Kambeitz, Allen, Lythgoe, et al, 2010). These assumptions have allowed researchers to implicate schizophrenia by using another pathway or biochemical mechanism other than dopamine hypothesis or dopaminergic

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)

This essay focuses on the diagnosis of schizophrenia, a major mental illness with much stigma and misinformation associated with it. World Health Organisation (WHO, 2012) epidemiological evidence suggests that schizophrenia is a mental illness affecting 24 million people worldwide. This essay will define schizophrenia and its characteristic signs and symptoms in relation to cognition, mood, behaviour and psychosocial functioning. The criteria enabling a diagnosis of schizophrenia are explored, as well as contemporary nursing care and pharmacological treatments. The positive and negative signs and symptoms of schizophrenia will be discussed and the treatment and care requirements outlined by the NSW Mental Health Act (2007) are also

Schizophrenia is a mental illness that is diagnosed in 0.5%-1% of the population in their lifetime (van Os et al, 2010). Its literal translation is ‘split-brain’, though it does not refer to multiple personality disorder, but rather a split from reality characterized by its disturbed perceptions, disorganized thinking and inappropriate emotions (Myers, 2010). Much research has been carried out to gain a better understanding of the causes of this serious disorder. A popular theory is the diathesis-stress model. This theory of schizophrenia proposes that stress can elicit a pre-existing vulnerability to the disorder (Jones & Fernyhough, 2007). This model focuses on the interaction between genetic heritability of the disorder, and the environments interaction