A horrifying mental disease

Artistic view of how the world feels like with schizophrenia

The mental disorder what I chose is the terrible disease of Schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia is a chronic and severe mental disorder that affects how a person thinks, feels, and behaves. People with schizophrenia may seem like they have lost touch with reality. 

Others symptoms can be a false belief, unclear or confused thinking, hearing voices that do not exist, reduced social engagement and emotional expression, and lack of motivation. 

Also, people with schizophrenia can have other mental health problems like anxiety or depression.

These symptoms come on gradually, begin in young adulthood, and, in many cases, regrettably, never resolve.

But... what is the cause? the combination of genetic and environmental factors play an important role in the development of schizophrenia. As in the case of people with a family history of schizophrenia, have a 20–40% chance of being diagnosed one year later.

Positive and negative symptoms

Schizophrenia is often described in terms of positive and negative symptoms. They can include delusions, disordered thoughts and speech, and tactile, auditory, visual, olfactory and gustatory hallucinations, typically regarded as manifestations of psychosis. Positive symptoms generally respond well to medication.

Negative symptoms are deficits of normal emotional responses and are less responsive to medication. They include flat expressions or little emotion, poverty of speech, inability to experience pleasure, lack of desire to form relationships, and lack of motivation. Negative symptoms appear to contribute more to poor quality of life, functional ability, and the burden on others than positive symptoms do.

Schizophrenia is diagnosed more frequently in males than females, and typically appears earlier in men, in the rang of 20–28 years for males and 26–32 years for females. Is much rarer see cases of this disorder in childhood or old age.

According to epidemiology studies named in Wikipedia, schizophrenia affects around 0.3–0.7% of people at some point in their life. The impact of schizophrenia tends to be highest in Oceania, the Middle East, and East Asia, while the nations of Australia, Japan, the United States, and most of Europe typically have low impact.

How is schizophrenia treated? Two main types of treatment can help with symptoms: antipsychotic medications and psychotherapy.

Schizophrenia is considered a disorder of the mind, but the latest research shows that organs, other than the brain, also change at the onset of the disease.

Scientists have known for a long time that people with schizophrenia have much higher rates of physical illness compared with the general population, and this contributes to startlingly high rates of premature death. People with the disorder die 15 to 20 years earlier than the average person.

This poor physical health has often been seen as a secondary effect of illness. Antipsychotic drugs, for example, are associated with an increased risk of weight gain and type 2 diabetes.

I choose this topic because most mental disorders seem very interesting, and in particular the schizophrenia.

The history of this disease is terrifying, and we never know if someone of our family or even us can suffer from this mental disease in the future, for this reason, it is good to know a little about the symptoms and causes.