Paranoid schizophrenia
If people do know about schizophrenia then this is the subtype they are most likely to be most familiar with. This involves systematized delusions or auditory hallucinations. They suffer from delusions of persecution, grandeur, control or jealousy which are often complex and which are often completely comprehensible.

They seldom display severely disorganized behavior, incoherence or loose association, they don’t e experience flat or inappropriate emotion – their demeanor is more formal and intense.

Disorganized schizophrenia

This can be characterized by silliness and incoherence, giggling or grimacing without any apparent reason. Extreme sensitivity to internal cues and extreme insensitivity to external cues means their behaviour is often seen as bizarre.

Like paranoid schizophrenia, disorganized schizophrenia involves delusions or hallucinations, though this time they tend to be focused on the individual sufferer and their bodies. For examples they might believe that their intestines are dissolving. Within this type, patients may also ignore personal grooming such as forgetting to shower or brush their hair.

Catatonic schizophrenia

Here, the defining features relate to motor behaviour. Patients frequently have frozen body postures, staying even in the most uncomfortable looking postures for a long time. They may also exhibit very excited movement, look agitated, resist control and look to be dangerous to themselves. Once again they might suffer hallucinations or delusions, often during these frozen episodes. These tend to focus on death and destruction.

Residual Schizophrenia

This is defined by the absence of such as delusions, hallucinations and incoherence exhibited by the previous three subtypes. Ins there place there are normally 2 or more symptoms such as marked social isolation, very peculiar behaviour, serious impairment of personal hygiene, flat or inappropriate emotional expression, bizarre thinking or unusual perceptual experiences

 

 

Undifferentiated schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is so difficult to pin down even into these subtypes, so professionals are left with a final category used to group those who don’t easily fall into any of the above.

WHAT IS IT?

Schizophrenia is a chronic, severe, and disabling brain disease. Approximately 1 percent of the population develops schizophrenia during their lifetime – more than 2 million Americans suffer from the illness in a given year. Although schizophrenia affects men and women with equal frequency, the disorder often appears earlier in men, usually in the late teens or early twenties, than in women, who are generally affected in the twenties to early thirties. People with schizophrenia often suffer terrifying symptoms such as hearing internal voices not heard by others, or believing that other people are reading their minds, controlling their thoughts, or plotting to harm them. These symptoms may leave them fearful and withdrawn. Their speech and behaviour can be so disorganized that they may be incomprehensible or frightening to others. Available treatments can relieve many symptoms, but most people with schizophrenia continue to suffer some symptoms throughout their lives; it has been estimated that no more than one in five individuals recovers completely.

This is a time of hope for people with schizophrenia and their families. Research is gradually leading to new and safer medications and unraveling the complex causes of the disease. Scientists are using many approaches from the study of molecular genetics to the study of populations to learn about schizophrenia. Methods of imaging the brain’s structure and function hold the promise of new insights into the disorder.

Advertisement