Understanding schizophrenic people

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Introduction

When the majority of us think about crazy people, we are often thinking of individuals with schizophrenia. It is clearly one of the conditions most commonly used when referring to a person with serious mental issues that makes him seem to be out of touch with reality, and makes him behave in a completely abnormal way.

Schizophrenia is one of the most difficult mental disorders we can experience, because the person who is suffering it can sometimes realize what is actually happening and they are aware their brain is malfunctioning but they cannot do anything about it.

The frustration these individuals must feel when going through one of these experiences must be quite intense, and to this day, there is no known cure for this problem.

In this article we are going cover every key aspect of this disorder, in order to fully understand what it is about.

Schizophrenia explained

This condition is defined as:

Schizophrenia is a disabling, chronic, and severe mental illness… Their disorganized behavior can be perceived as incomprehensible or frightening to others. | Source
Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness characterized by incoherent or illogical thoughts, bizarre behavior and speech, and delusions or hallucinations, such as hearing voices. Schizophrenia typically begins in early adulthood. | Source

The proper understanding of this condition has been getting better as time pass, and although the cause of this disorder is still difficult to determine, its clear symptoms have been absolutely well defined. Despite this, having misconceptions about the symptoms is quite common and even though they are similar, schizophrenia is not the same as other related issues such as bipolar disorder and multiple personality disorder. Also, people with schizophrenia are not perpetually incoherent or psychotic, they have episodes and that is when they start to act erratically.

These individuals will experience an intense disruption in cognition and emotion, affecting the most fundamental human qualities such as language, thought, affection, and the sense of oneself, in short, schizophrenia can condition the very perception of reality in the person dealing with it.

Schizophrenia crosses all socioeconomic, cultural, and racial boundaries. The lifetime risk of developing the illness has been estimated at about 8 per 1,000. Schizophrenia is the single largest cause of admissions to mental hospitals and accounts for an even larger proportion of the permanent populations of such institutions. | Source

This disorder is quite complex and it has a great variety of powerful symptoms including psychopathic manifestations, such as hearing internal voices or experiencing other sensations not connected with a real source and assigning an unusual meaning to normal occurrences, as well as constantly adopting false beliefs with no proper justification for it.

Below we can see a video of a person going through a schizophrenic episode, we can notice how this man even though he is having hallucinations, he is also aware of his condition and he realizes that what he is experiencing is the result of his disorder, we can also notice his frustration when using the phone and realizing there is no one calling, and yet he decided to answer it only to find out there was no one on the other side of the call:

Stressful experiences often precede the emergence of schizophrenia. Before any acute symptoms are apparent, people with schizophrenia habitually become bad-tempered, anxious, and unfocused. This can trigger relationship problems, divorce, and unemployment. | Source

People with schizophrenia have delusional ideas which are simply erroneous beliefs firmly held due to distortions or exaggerations of their reasoning and interpretations of what is actually happening. Delusions about being persecuted or constantly being observed by others are the most popular ones, or believing there are secret messages from the TV and pretty much any other source of digital sound or information.

As we can see in the video, they also have strong hallucinations because of their flawed perception regarding their senses. They can see things that aren’t real (in the video he mentioned people staring at him in the bathroom mirror) as well as imagining sounds and believing it is real (this happened with his phone). All of this can easily drain the person’s energy especially if this happens on a constant basis.

Another important aspect is the fact these episodes can make the person adopt a disorganized speech that makes it very difficult to understand what they are talking about, they are overwhelmed by not being able to handle so many hallucinations and eventually they cannot properly formulate their ideas nor coordinate their thoughts.

Something similar can also happen with their behavior, they can lose control of it because of their delusional beliefs causing considerable difficulties when doing daily activities, and they can become very agitated and unpredictable individuals moving excessively without any purpose, which can be a factor that highly contributes to their social isolation. Catatonic behaviors on the other hand, are represented by a considerable decrease in the reaction to the immediate surrounding environment, sometimes even being immobile or maintaining a strange posture and having a lack of awareness regarding what is currently happening.

Developing of schizophrenia

This disorder generally starts to develop during young adulthood, although it can happen at any age. Its developing can be abrupt or gradual, but most people experience some early symptoms, such as increased social isolation, a general loss of interests, unusual behavior, among others which are often the first behaviors that might concern the people close to the individual because it can be a sign something is seriously wrong.

Considerable evidence shows that genetic factors play a central role in schizophrenia; however, adoption studies have highlighted the additional importance of environmental factors. Neurotransmitter and brain abnormalities, which may be linked to environmental factors such as obstetric complications or exposure to influenza during the gestational period, have also been implicated. | Source

Although it is important to notice that how others see and interpret those symptoms can vary from culture to culture, because things like having visions, or hearing celestial voices from a higher being, can be seen as something normal and inspiring in highly religious cultures, in many communities, seeing or being visited by a recently deceased person is not unusual among family members because for them voices can also be interpreted as the voices of their ancestors. Sometimes, the voices are pleasant, and they give the person and his family some necessary advice, but if the voices are aggressive, they are considered as the actions of demons or some other evil being, so showing signs of schizophrenia can sometimes be seen as having a highly religious experience rather that having a mental disorder.

However, people suffering from this problem will eventually start to speak less than before because they will feel exhausted after having their energy drained for constantly dealing with their hallucinations, which will damage the quality of the social interactions they have, even to the point of stopping them from really expressing their emotions and having honest and deep talks, this can cause feelings of emotional emptiness and general dissatisfaction for not being able to properly engage with others. Therefore, ending up being apathetic individuals with no care for their personal looks nor hygiene is a possibility.

Another result of developing this disorder is having changes related to their memory and thinking ability, these people can experience a decrease in their ability to understand, store and use information to make correct decisions. This means it can be much more difficult for them to learn new things and maintain a proper productivity in their professional life, becoming less and less capable as time pass.

The intensity of everything mentioned can vary with time depending on the person, but the truth is once this disorder is developed, most people do not return to their previous state of mental functioning, what they can do is to get better and recover partially but never totally.

People with schizophrenia might experience a break from reality from time to time, but they are not broken. And despite their illness, individuals with schizophrenia can make wonderful contributions to our community. | Source

Conclusion

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that usually begins with symptoms of hallucinations resulting in a lack of contact with reality, as well as abnormal behaviors that can not be easily justified, and these among many other reasons can cause the individual to gradually isolate himself more and more, eventually reducing his social relationship close to zero, which can facilitate the manifestation of a depressed state.

Sometimes this issue can be seen as the result of a supernatural occurrence, but the fact is this is simply the brain of the individual malfunctioning and completely affecting the way he processes information.

Optimism is important and patients, family members and mental health professionals need to be mindful that many patients have a favorable course of illness, that challenges can often be addressed, and that patients have many personal strengths that can be recognized and supported. | Source

In order to avoid this spiral of mental degeneration, the sooner this issue is recognized the better, because if it remains ignored, with time, it will only get worse and maybe when close people finally decide to act accordingly and look for a solution, the person with the disorder might already be too affected.

As we could see in the video, even while having episodes they can be aware of it, and of their condition, so showing them the proper support and love is also important so they can get better. If they feel abandoned overcoming this complicate issue will be much harder than otherwise.