Schizophrenia, Psychoses and Antipsychotics

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Schizophrenia, Psychoses and Antipsychotics

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that is characterized by behaviours wherein the individual has difficulty separating and recognizing reality from what is fantastical or imagined leading to abnormal social behavior. Symptoms often observed among schizophrenics include confused and unclear thought patterns, reports of auditory hallucinations, false beliefs and interpretations of reality, visual hallucinations, disorganized thoughts delusions and behaviour changes impacting the ability to relate and communicate. Oftentimes, schizophrenia is long-term making it a severe mental health condition (WebMD, 2015). It affects 1 out of 100 people in some stages during the course of their lives between the ages of 15 and 35. Causes are often genetic but early environment and social and psychological factors also add to the risk (i.e. homelessness, long-term unemployment, drug addiction, poverty, major depression, etc.). Recreational as well as prescription drugs can also cause, and if the individual is genetically prone to psychosis, worsen schizophrenia. There are 5 main types of schizophrenia, as follows (WebMD, 2015): paranoid schizophrenia characterized by delusions of persecution; disorganized schizophrenia characterized by incoherent, confused and jumbled speech coupled by flat, even childlike behaviour; catatonic schizophrenia where individuals become unresponsive and immobile and are unwilling to move; undifferentiated schizophrenia when symptoms do not fall into the first 3; and residual schizophrenia - the state when the severity has decreased in terms of symptoms. In understanding schizophrenia it is important to understand psychosis. According to Randle (2010), "Psychosis is not a mental health disorder per se. People experience psychosis in the course of psychotic-based disorders such as ...