The symptoms of schizophrenia are classified in two groups: positive and negative symptoms. The positive symptoms refer to those characters which come as a supplementary to the patient's personality and consist out of disordered thinking and psychotic symptoms. The negative symptoms refer to those characters which disappear due to schizophrenia, like loosing emotion and expression. These negative symptoms are the first to appear in a schizophrenic person.

Schizophrenia makes the affected people not to manifest any emotion any more; they do not enjoy the things that used to give them satisfaction like going out with friends, going swimming, golfing or playing tennis. Because they have a lack of motion and show little face expression they do not have many friends and do not make friends so easily.

They often have problems at school or at work because they can not focus any more, they have a lack of motivation and they process information with difficulty.

Many people who observe these changes in close persons think that this is due to other health problems, to depression or substance abuse and do not think about schizophrenia.

The category of positive symptoms contains hallucinations meaning that the affected person might hear voices, might see things which are not present, or might even smell something that is not there.

Some schizophrenic people might believe that they are sent by God and that they have a special mission which needs to be completed soon; others might think they are the US President and are not easy to convince that this is not true.

These people are confused, they can not answer properly to a question, and they have a strange way of speaking which makes them hardly understood by others. Sometimes they answer questions with one word, like yes or no, and they are not sociable people, avoiding new acquaintances and strangers.

They have a non-organized behavior, they are sometimes very nervous and agitated without a proper reason and they have disorganized body movements like rocking in the chair back and forth for a long time.

They do not take care of themselves any more, they get dirty but they do not take a bath for weeks, they do not wash their clothes and leave their house unclean until it makes that space impossible to live in.

People consider them mean and strange because they have inappropriate behaviors like smiling or laughing at a funeral, in an inappropriate moment or without a specific reason. In some cases, more rarely jerking eye movements can occur.

Schizophrenic symptoms appear depending on the type of schizophrenia a person has. In the case of paranoid schizophrenia, the patient might be constantly afraid due to the fact that a problem with interpreting the reality has occurred. Catatonic schizophrenic people stand in a strange uncomfortable position for a long time; the disorganized schizophrenic patients create a language that nobody understands or even create rhyming words continuously. A more rare form of schizophrenia is the Childhood schizophrenia which causes a lack of emotion, disorganized speech, and hallucinations.