Being one of the most debilitating and baffling mental illnesses, schizophrenia varies in its severity from individual to individual, although it has a specific set of symptoms.



It is known that usually this illness can be controlled with treatment, and many people may recover from it, if they continue treatment and rehabilitation for many years.

It is possible that patients with schizophrenia will need to continue treatment for all their life, but treatments can allow many of them to work, live with their families and friends, and find life enjoyable.

Schizophrenia begins usually during adolescence or young adulthood, appearing gradually. In many cases young people feel tense, can't concentrate and withdraw socially. Work, social relationships and appearance will begin to deteriorate.

In time, the symptoms will become very bizarre, the patient will develop peculiar behavior, begins talking in nonsense, and has unusual perceptions. It is known that this is the beginning of psychosis.

It was seen that schizophrenia deals with relapse and remission, which means that sometimes people with schizophrenia seem to be normal, but when the acute or psychotic phase comes, they stop thinking logically and may lose all sense of who they are.

Delusions, hallucinations or disordered thinking and speech can appear.

When patients have hallucinations, they hear voices that a normal person does not, and these voices can comment on the patient's behavior, can give orders or insult. It is known that there can also appear visual hallucinations, like seeing unreal things, or tactile hallucinations, such as a burning or itching sensation.

Delusions are thoughts that have no basis in reality, are bizarre, and we can mention that, for example some patients believe that someone is planning to harm them, that someone is reading their thoughts, that the aliens can control them and other things.

It was seen that patients can also suffer disordered thinking. In this case, the associations among their thoughts are very loose. They can make up their own words which have no meaning for the others, they can shift from one topic to another that is completely unrelated, without realizing that they are making no logical sense and other things.

Schizophrenia is a very severe condition, it distorts the ability of the patient to know whether an event or situation they perceive is real. They wonder if the voice they hear is only in their head, or is real, if what they see is real or happens only in their head. This uncertainty adds to the terror that already is presented in them because of the distorted reality they perceive.

Psychotic symptoms of schizophrenia may lessen during remission but there are symptoms that continue during both remission and relapse. We can mention here social withdrawal, inappropriate or blunted emotions, and extreme apathy.

There are a lot of types of schizophrenia. For example, a patient that has a lot of feelings of persecution is called to have paranoid schizophrenia, the one who is often incoherent but has no delusions has disorganized schizophrenia.

We must also say that lack or absence of initiative, motivation, social interest, enjoyment and emotional responsiveness are signs of the negative or deficit schizophrenia.

About 150 of every 100,000 persons will develop schizophrenia, it affects men and women equally, and even if it is relatively rare, schizophrenia is one of the most catastrophic mental illnesses.