ESL 91 FALL, 2001 STUDENT ESSAYS: PSYCHOLOGY

When we hear about Schizophrenia, most of us think that the person with schizophrenia has more than one personality. The truth is the victim with Schizophrenia has a mental disease characterized by unpredictable disturbances in thinking, emotion, perception, and behavior. The word Schizophrenia is divided into two components, which are schizo and phrenia. Schizo means "split ", which refers to personality and also focus when people are losing touch with reality. Phrenia means “ mind” and refers to a split mind . There are many different factors that cause Schizophrenia. Furthermore, the symptoms may be positive or negative. We can reduce these symptoms with treatments that can be useful to patients with this mental disorder. Unfortunately , although it can be treated , schizophrenia is not curable.

The exact cause of schizophrenia is unknown, but many factors are involved in this disease. These factors include changes in the chemistry of the brain, changes in the structure of the brain, excessive levels of dopamine, and genetic factors. Also there are other factors, which are environmental, genetic and biochemical.

There are several environmental factors. Differential diagnosis is one environmental factor . This factor occurs when psychiatrists are concerned about identifying wealthy people as schizophrenics , so they diagnose more poor people as having a greater chance to get Schizophrenia. The second environmental factor is called downward drift. This factor occurs when people cannot stand their job and education and as a result of this they may become of low class. The third environmental factor happens when people live in poor places with high crime rates, and as a result of this, they get stress and at the same time they get schizophrenia.

Another cause of this disease is genetic factors. People who have relatives with schizophrenia have a 10% greater chance of developing it. Researchers have found that identical twins stand a 50% to 85% chance of sharing the disease.

Another cause of schizophrenia is biochemical factors. People with schizophrenia have a chemical imbalance in their brains. The brains of schizophrenics produce too much of the neurotransmitter, dopamine . Neurotransmitters allow nerve cells in the brain to send messages to each other to make the brain function normally. The brains of schizophrenics have too much of the brain chemical called dopamine. Dopamine affects brain processes that control movement, emotional response, and the ability to experience enjoyment.

There are four major subtypes of schizophrenia and each subtype has different symptoms. Also there are positive and negative symptoms. The difference between these symptoms is that a positive symptom shows clearly the attendance of not normal behavior and also may be controlled . On the other hand , negative symptoms , show the absence of normal behavior. The first subtype is simple schizophrenia. Simple schizophrenia has positive symptoms such as, hallucinations or delusions . In hallucinations , people may see, hear, touch smell objects that do not exist. Also, they may hear voices and they are the only one who can hear them. In delusions the schizophrenic may believe in something that is not true. The second subtype of schizophrenia is paranoid and its symptom is delusions of persecution. The person may believe that he or she is being persecuted or harassed. Also, they do not trust anyone. The third subtype is hebephrenic schizophrenia. Here people may have a disorganized behavior, disorganized speech, unusual mannerisms and facial expressions. The fourth subtype is catatonic schizophrenia, where symptoms are motoric immobility and waxy flexibility. Also the people with this subtype may have strange facial expressions, may mimic the behavior of others, and may repeat words that others say.

There is no cure for schizophrenia. Therefore, a schizophrenic needs lots of treatment to reduce his or her symptoms. The first treatment is hospitalization and the purpose of this treatment is to evaluate and diagnose the patient, to stabilize the dangerous behavior and to familiarize the patients with treatment. There are also drugs that help schizophrenics to reduce some symptoms; these drugs are called antipsychotic drugs. Drugs are useful for reducing hallucinations and delusions. Unfortunately drugs do not reduce other symptoms .

Schizophrenia affects 10% of the population. This disease affects the way people think, their speech, emotions, and behavior. The victims with this disorder lose touch with reality. Environmental factors, genetic factors and biochemical factors are some causes of schizophrenia. While scientists have not found the cure for this disease, they have discovered treatments to reduce the symptoms of schizophrenia.

It was very interesting for me to learn about schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by unpredictable disturbances in thinking, emotion, perception, and behavior. However, poor people are more affected with this mental disorder because they have a lot of stress. Furthermore, the symptoms of schizophrenia are hallucinations, delusions, disorganized thought, disorganized behavior and difficulty expressing emotion. Also there are different subtypes of schizophrenia and these are simple schizophrenia , paranoid schizophrenia, hebephrenic schizophrenia and catatonic schizophrenia.

When I was in High School, I remember that an old man in the bus was always talking to himself and crying too. In those days I just wondered, what was wrong with him. He was always putting a bag next to him. I thought that he was mean and crazy. I think that he was just trying to be isolated from the people. Therefore, thanks to my research about schizophrenia, I have realized that this old man probably had the third subtype schizophrenia , hebephrenia, because when he was talking he had a strange facial expression and had very incoherent speech. For example, One day somebody asked him a question and he started talking like a person who did not know how to talk by saying words that were not understandable.

Learning about schizophrenia has been very helpful for me. Moreover, doing research about schizophrenia has helped to become more educated. When I was I in High School I did not learn and know about any mental disorders. As a result of this, it brought me negative thoughts about people who were schizophrenics and I did not know that they were schizophrenics. Nowadays, I feel proud of myself because I have a knowledge about schizophrenia .

There are many mental disorders that are known to affect man, and each has its own ways of affecting. Schizophrenia is a brain disease that affects many people of the population. Many people are asking what is schizophrenia? What are its symptoms, its causes, how can it be treated and how does it manifest itself when someone has it?

Schizophrenia is a chronic and severe brain disorder that affects more than 2 million people in the US and several more millions around the world. It is a mental illness that affects men and women alike. According to researchers, although schizophrenia affects men and women at almost the same rate, the disease usually appears earlier in men. Often men are affected in their twenties, while women are usually affected in their thirties.

Schizophrenia can make a person lose contact with reality. It is a serious problem that relates to your brain; it makes you act differently from the others. When you are affected by schizophrenia, you don’t have the same sense of reality as others have. There is a lot of confusion in your mind. This confusion affects your behavior in the society. In general a schizophrenic person is someone who has trouble dealing with the real world and everyday life. Schizophrenia sometimes is hereditary, so that you may get it from your parents or your previous generations. Schizophrenia is a biological problem in the brain.

There are many symptoms that relate to schizophrenia. Some symptoms of schizophrenia are the unusual things that you start to feel or things that you imagine. The symptoms of schizophrenia are: hallucinations, delusions, disorganized speech, and disorganized behavior. A hallucination is when someone imagines events or objects, which are not true or real. The most common hallucination is hearing voices that tell the schizophrenic what to do. Here is an example of a hallucination: My brother has hallucinations where he sees demons chasing him. A delusion is when you believe in your imagination, and you think that it is something real; also you might believe that someone is listening to your thoughts or reading your ideas. Let me give you an example. My father is 65 years old but he has delusion that he is a 17-year-old boy. Sometimes he dresses like 17 year old and even talks the same way they do. Disorganized speech is when you are talking to someone and that person mixes up everything that he/she says. So that person doesn’t really stay focused on the topic that you are talking. When you are talking to someone like that you get confuse because that person is not on the same track as you. I have a friend whose speech is disorganized. He always answers questions that are not related together. The last symptom is the one called disorganized behavior; this one makes you feel like a stranger. The reason why I say that is because that behavior makes you feel like you are different from everybody. A person with a disorganized behavior often has a strange look. It also makes you misbehave in the society. Sometimes it makes you dress like a stranger.

There are several causes of schizophrenia, such as: Genetics (Heredity), environment and Biochemical factors. Many scientists have discovered that the disorder tends to run in the family. It is known that high stress (from the environment.) can lead to the development of schizophrenia.

Biochemical factors can also cause schizophrenia. The brain is not working like everybody else’s is and anomalies develop. The schizophrenic brain is really different compared to that of a normal person. Through a machine (PET. SCAN) that can scan the brain, the doctors can see into the schizophrenic brain. The result comes in colors that mean different activity in different parts of the brain. The yellow and red colors mean there is a lot of activity in the brain, and when there’s no activity in the brain, the color of the result is blue and black.

Today there are many treatments for schizophrenia, and the treatments have improved a lot of people that had schizophrenia. In this case you find that psychologists and psychotherapists play a wonderful role because they help people with that disease. But still there is a lot of work to be done because a schizophrenic can’t really be cured 100%. However, with treatment, a person can feel very well and lead a normal life.

In conclusion, we find that schizophrenia is a disease that everybody should be aware of. It is a serious mental disorder. Everyone has to be careful with it because it makes you lose your way in the society. Schizophrenia makes you completely different from others. It makes you act abnormally because you do things that you are not supposed to do in the society.

Marie Louis
ESL 91
Fall, 2001

ESSAY TOPIC: Describe the mental disorder schizophrenia. Discuss the causes, symptoms, and treatment of schizophrenia. Be sure to talk about the biological bases of the disorder.

All over the world there are some people who suffer from schizophrenia. This psychotic disorder can be severe or hardly noticeable. It is one of the most important public heath problems.

Schizophrenia is a mental illness that is characterized by a break with reality. This means that when a person has this psychotic disorder, his behavior becomes strange and abnormal. The schizophrenic doesn't have the ability to think clearly and logically.

Schizophrenia most commonly starts in adolescence or early adulthood. This is not a contagious illness. Many people diagnosed with schizophrenia have no close relative who is schizophrenic. Some do not themselves develop the disorder even if their mother or father was schizophrenic. This is not a rare disorder because one in every hundred people has schizophrenia. However, this psychotic disorder appears earlier in men than in women. Men usually develop schizophrenia in the late twenties while women are generally affected in their twenties to early thirties.

There are four subtypes of schizophrenia. The first is paranoid schizophrenia. A person who is paranoid may think that they are great historical figures like Jesus Christ or the president of the United States. The second subtype of schizophrenia is catatonic. One symptom of catatonic schizophrenia is waxy flexibility, where a person can take a posture, and stay for hours like that. The third subtype is hebephrenic. Here, the hebephrenic person has poor performance at school or work. Their speech is very weak. The symptoms of hebephrenic schizophrenia are so gradual that sometimes they are hardly noticed the first time. The last subtype is simple schizophrenia. Simple schizophrenics can have some hallucinations. They may hear voices when no one is present.

There are some people who ask what causes schizophrenia? It is an illness that is caused by many factors. The environment is the first factor that can cause schizophrenia. For example if a person lives in a high crime rate area, the person has increased stress that the environment caused. So, this person has more chance to get the disease. The second factor is genetic. There is a heredity gene that has not yet been identified. Moreover, the disease does appear more regularly in some families. For example if an identical twin has schizophrenia, there is a 35-55% higher chance for the other to have the disorder. It is a factor that plays an important role in causing schizophrenia. The brains of schizophrenics contain a lot of chemical dopamine. When there is too much dopamine, this produces problems in the brain.

The best way to help people with this disorder is medication. They also need help from a mental health professional because suicide is a risk in schizophrenia. Treatment can reduce that risk and minimize the consequences. Anti-psychotic drugs are one set of medications that reduce psychotic symptoms. These drugs help to control the production of the neurotransmitter dopamine. Some scientists are advancing in the treatment and prevention of schizophrenia. It is known that one gene which predisposes someone for schizophrenia is found or a chromosome. Scientists think that this gene does not act alone, which means that some people with the gene do not develop schizophrenia, while some people without it do.

To conclude, I think that this psychotic disorder can bring people in isolation. It can change anyone who has those symptoms. I think that the only way to reduce the chance of this psychotic disorder is to learn as much as possible about the disease, the causes, the symptoms, and the treatment. That could help us if the disease comes to family members. As a friend we will know how to deal with it. We just have to hope that in the future there will be a cure for this mental disorder.

How can we describe schizophrenia? Schizophrenia is a kind of disorder that some people suffer. Schizophrenia shows some major psychotic symptoms such as: delusion and hallucinations. Schizophrenia has four major subtypes: simple schizophrenia, paranoid schizophrenia, hebephrenic (disorganized) schizophrenia, and catatonic schizophrenia. The etiology or causes of schizophrenia have several factors: environmental, genetic and biochemical.

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by a problem with reality. People who suffer from schizophrenia have problems with the language and speak very differently. They say things without any sense, and they act without thinking.

Their personality is different by the way they act with other people. They are very emotional. They don’t have friends and usually avoid people. Schizophrenia is characterized by a lot of symptoms, such as delusions and hallucinations.

Delusions are false beliefs. If you suffer from delusions, your thoughts are different. These people will have a conviction that everyone is looking at them. People will do something very bizarre, as saying that person is coming to get them or kill them. However, hallucinations means that the schizophrenia may hear voices that nobody else can hear. They also often see or feel things that don’t exist. They are very sick people.

There are four major subtypes of schizophrenia. The first one is simple schizophrenia. A simple schizophrenia may have hallucinations and delusions. They may hear voices that are not there or they may laugh for no reason. The second schizophrenic subtype is paranoid schizophrenia. Some one who suffers from paranoid doesn’t trust others. A paranoid will insist on what he thinks and will never agree with any body. Even if someone tells them there is no reason to be suspicious, they won’t give up. Paranoid schizophrenic, are also defensive. They are always fighting off feelings of inadequacy, and they blame other people for no reason. Another type is hebephrenic (disorganized) schizophrenia. This is characterized by a total break with reality. Hebephrenics don’t have contact with the society; they lose contact and their behavior is very disorganized. Their speech is very bizarre; you cannot understand what they are saying. People who have this type of schizophrenia have a very serious problem and personality disorganization. The last type is catatonic schizophrenia. In catatonic the person may seem to be in a total panic. Catatonic schizophrenic can bring about a condition where person can stay for a longtime in the same position. Sometimes they are very immobile. For example” Sum (1975) describes Manuel saying, the catatonic appeared to be physically healthy on examination. Yet he did not regain his awareness of his surroundings. He remained motionless, speechless and seemingly unconscious. One evening an aide turned him on the side to straighten out the sheet, was called away to tend another patient, and forgot to return. Manuel was found the next morning still on his side, his arm tucked under his body, as he had been left the night before.

Schizophrenia is caused by many factors as environmental, genetic and biochemical. The environmental is the most complicated one. It affects people differently. It can affect any one at any time in life. For example if you are pregnant and you have a virus at the time of the birth; the baby can possibly have something wrong in his brain during his life. Also there are some people who have lower income. These people can more likely have high stresses play a big role also. People whose parents or identical twin suffer from schizophrenia are more likely to become schizophrenics the brain of schizophrenics. Dopamine is an important substance found in the brain. If you have too much dopamine in your brain it can affect your behavior and emotion. Too much dopamine is related to hallucinations and delusions.

Schizophrenia is a very serious disorder. Schizophrenia has been treated most with drug therapy, and supervision. Those treatments have been available since 1950 and there are also three other medical techniques used to treat schizophrenia. The first, called ct, or computer photography, is a computer-enhanced x-ray. It is used to take a picture of the brain. The MRI scans (magnetic resonance imaging) can see inside the brain and other areas that look abnormal (Debrief et al. 1992; Forager et al 1996; Guru et al 1998). The third technique, called PET-scan (Position mission photography), provides an image of brain activity. The PET-scan allows doctors to see how the brain is working. Other treatments are antipsychotic drugs. The antipsychotic drugs allow the patient to function move effectively and reduce symptoms of schizophrenia like hallucinations and delusions.

Schizophrenia is a mental illness that makes it difficult for people to behave and think normally. People with schizophrenia see the reality differently. They need to have good treatment, and they need the helps of a doctor who is very good. There is no cure? With medication I think they will resolve the problem.

Schizophrenia is a disease that makes people ‘s mind upside down; it is known as an emotionally devastating illness. More than two million Americans suffer from the illness in a given year.

There are four really major subtypes of Schizophrenia. Simple schizophrenia is characterized by hallucinations and delusions. The individual is withdrawn from others. Paranoid schizophrenia is when the individual may not trust anyone or may be anxious or angry. In hebephrenic Schizophrenia people lose touch with reality and their speech and their words are meaningless. And Catatonic Schizophrenia is characterized by strange motor symptoms, such as severity or wild excitement. On occasion the Catatonic Schizophrenia alternates between these two extremes.

Schizophrenia can affect men and women. It usually appears in men in the late teens or early twenties. Women are generally affected in the twenties and thirties. Schizophreniais found over the entire world. Schizophrenia can affect any one. Children can have Schizophrenia too, but not younger then the age of five years.

At first Schizophrenics usually appear confused, and their behavior changes. A person who suffers from paranoid schizophrenia imagines someone or something after them. They suffer terrifying symptoms such as hearing internal voices not heard by others or they believe that other people can read their minds, control their thoughts or plot to harm them. Those symptoms can lead them to be afraid and to withdraw. The way they speak and behave can be so disorganized that they are frightening to other people. The first sign of Schizophrenia usually appears as confusion and behavior changes.

Hallucinations, delusions and illusions are the most common symptoms that Schizophrenic people. Delusions are false beliefs. Are people with schizophrenia likely to be violent? We might say people aren’t well in their minds; they may do anything. But this is wrong. People with schizophrenia would not commit crimes unless they were mentally ill before.

What causes Schizophrenia? There is not one thing that causes Schizophrenia. Scientists don’t understand yet all the causes of Schizophrenia but many diseases like heart disease result from an interplay of genetic, behavioral, and other factors. That may be the case for Schizophrenia as well People who have a parent with Schizophrenia can more easily develop this disease than other people who do not have a parent with it. Some studies say that there are some people with Schizophrenia who may recover completely. Others improve to the point where they can live independently, often with the maintenance of drug therapy.

Scientists suggest that hospitalization is often necessary in cases of Schizophrenia. This procedure ensures the safety of the person who is affected. During the hospitalization, the schizophrenic can be observed by trained mental health professionals and appropriately diagnosed. Medications can reduce the psychotic symptoms of Schizophrenia. Psychotic drugs are the best treatment now available but they don’t cure the disease and there may be further psychotic episodes. The person may also need assistance in readjusting to society when his\her symptoms are controlled.

What can\should you do if a loved one is sick? You should not humiliate a person suffering from Schizophrenia. The best way to treat a friend or a relative with Schizophrenia is with compassion, understanding and support. They should not be made to feel that it is their fault. They need your help, your support and the support of the family.

Even if they resist treatment or medications, schizophrenic patients believe that delusions or hallucinations are real. Sometimes only you or friends close to the person can see the behavior or the ideas. You should ask to speak with the doctor evaluating the patient so that you get can and provide all the information about him.

To conclude, Schizophrenia is a disease that anyone can have. We should not treat people badly because unfortunately anyone can have it without any exceptions.

ESL 91 FALL, 2001 STUDENT ESSAYS PSYCHOLOGY

ESL 91
FALL, 2001
STUDENT ESSAYS
PSYCHOLOGY