Schizophrenia Symptoms Causes Diagnosis and Treatment

Shri Rishi Psychiatry Clinic – Schizophrenia Treatment Center

Schizophrenia is a long-standing disorder in which hallucinations or delusions are prominent symptoms and usually present. Here delusions mean false, firm and unshakable fix beliefs e.g. something will happen to me, someone is harming or trying to kill me or spreading bad about me. Delusions also include the belief that someone has done black magic on me.

Hallucinations mean hearing voices in the absence of external source. Often a person responds to those voices, which is noted as self-talk.

Three phases of Disorder

1. The Prodrome phase refers to a deterioration in function before the onset of the active symptomatic phase.

2.The Active phase: symptoms (delusions, hallucinations, disorganized speech, grossly disorganized behavior, or negative symptoms) must be present for at least one month.

3. The residual phase: follows the active phase. Means functionality regained partially and some of the symptoms persist.

The features of the residual and prodromal phases include functional impairment and abnormalities of affect, cognition, and communication.

Schizophrenia has subtypes according to the most prominent symptoms present at the time of the evaluation. They are paranoid, disorganized, catatonic, undifferentiated, and residual types.

Schizophrenia can be treated with complete recovery if detected earlier in the course of the disorder.

Many factors contribute to the course of illness like the age of onset, severity of symptoms, comorbid medical conditions, initiation, and continuation of treatment, family history of illness.

In many families due to lack of awareness about disorder and stigma of mental illness, the disorder is not diagnosed early. Also, many times after diagnosis patient usually is taken to religious healers and faith healers and medical treatment often discontinued. In this process, a crucial period of treatment lost, which further adds to the poor outcome of illness.

In some people, we may have to continue treatment for lifelong.

For cases where there is a risk of suicide or rapid response expected or medicines are contraindicated needs Electro Convulsive Therapy (ECT), which is proven for these conditions with good outcomes.

Also, for patient’s rehabilitation, social skill development, many therapies like behavior therapy, skill training, art therapy etc. are available at the hospital.