Understanding Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a mental health condition that affects how a person thinks, feels and behaves. It’s a combination of hallucinations, delusions and disorganized thinking and behavior. When you get diagnosed, the symptoms have to be persisting for at least 6 months.

When someone is having a hallucination, they are seeing and/or hearing something that isn’t present to anyone else. They feel like it’s right in the room with them.  

Delusions: Fixed false beliefs held, despite clear or reasonable evidence that they are not true.

The most common is persecutory or paranoid delusions. It’s when a person believes they are being harmed or harassed by another person.

Hallucinations: They experience hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting or feeling things that are not there. They are vivid and clear with the impression similar to normal perceptions.

The most common is auditory hallucinations, also known as “hearing voices.”

When someone is having an episode, they aren’t able to distinguish between what is real and what is false.

There are symptoms that are abnormally present, known as positive symptoms. They contain hallucinations, paranoid and exaggerated or distorted perceptions, beliefs and behaviors.

Then there are negative symptoms that are known as abnormally absent. They contain impaired emotional expression (affective flattening), decreased speech output (alogia), reduced desire to have social contact (asocially), reduced drive to initiate and persist in self-directed purposeful activities (avolition) and decreased experience of pleasure (anhedonia).

Someone with schizophrenia can have problems with cognition. Attention, concentration and memory and the decline of performing at school and work are affected.

Symptoms start to appear around early adulthood. Men are often show symptoms in their early teens to early 20s, while women show symptoms in their 20s and early 30s. There are signs that indicate early symptoms such as troubled relationships, school performance and reduced motivation.

Going through trauma sometimes causes physical changes in the body which will increase the chances of someone being at risk developing a mental health condition. A combination of genetic and environmental factors can result in schizophrenia. People who experienced a traumatic event may be a trigger for the condition.

Even if you have a family history of the condition, you may not develop schizophrenia.

With the right treatment and medication, you can live a successful and long life with schizophrenia. It will help you with what’s real and what isn’t. You have to be able to put in the work to manage it and take control. Like every mental health condition, you can’t ignore the symptoms. It’s going to get harder to live with since you won’t have the support and the medication.

You have to be patient and understand that when someone is struggling with the condition, you need to remain calm, ask how you can help, encourage them to see someone who can help, don’t judge or argue, get help in emergencies. Don’t be afraid, they are already scared as it is. They shouldn’t have to go through it alone.