Chapter 4 - Schizophrenia and Other Psychotic Disorders

What is Psychosis

Describes a mental state characterized by a profound disturbance in thinking or has a hard time distinguishing between most people’s reality and their own perception of the world

Schizophrenia three categories of symptoms

• Positive

• Negative

• Symptoms related to disorganization

Positive symptoms

Two primary forms: hallucinations and delusions

• Less common one relates to speech

  • Disorganized or repetitive language

Hallucinations

Involve having a sensory experience that occurs without stimulus

• Most common is auditory (hearing sounds and voices)

• Can involve other senses (seeing, feeling, tasting, and smelling)

• Can be pleasant to some

• Delusions

Involve a person holding beliefs that most consider impossible

• Can be described as “irrational” or “false” (subjective)

Different kinds of delusions like persecutors, grandiose, eromantic

Persecutory

Feeling that they are being targeted

Grandiose

Experiencing great power

Erotomanic delusion

Believing someone is in love with them

Negative symptoms

Relates to feelings and behaviours that are describes a deficits in “normal behaviour”

• Chronic

Blunted effect

Facial expressions and tone are less expressive

Poverty of control

When a person with schizophrenia speaks a lot but doesn’t have any meaningful concepts

Avolition

Lack of drive, difficulty initiating to engage in activities

Anhedonia

The inability to experience pleasure

Disturbances in cognition

• Cognition deficits

• A persons memory, attention, and learning may be affected

Hearing voices Movement

brings together individuals who define themselves as "experts by experience” to make the case that hearing voices should not be understood simply as a problematic medical symptom, but rather as a meaningful component of human experience.

5 Values of the Hearing Voices Movement

1. Voice hearing is not restricted to sick or those experiencing mental illness

2. No correct way to explain phenomenon: cultural and personal beliefs

e.g., more negative in individualistic societies such as America, less negative in collective societies such as Africa and Ghana

3. Take ownership of their experience-be empowered, rather than defined by “expert” explanations or medical intervention

4. Voices not result of disease; consider psychological emotional and spiritual experience

5. Challenges dominant belief that voices must be suppressed; rather accepted as real and significant aspect of person’s existence

Schizophrenia Debates and Controversies

There is no scientific consensus about many aspects of schizophrenia.

Is schizophrenia a medical disease?

• Why do schizophrenia symptoms vary so widely among different

individuals?

• Should this illness be understood as a broad category of related diseases

(e.g., similar to cancer categorizations)?

• Should this illness be understood as a social construction to categorize

what is considered by some to be strange and unusual behaviours?

Schizophrenia stigma

There are many powerful and negative beliefs about schizophrenia

• People with schizophrenia are characterized as damaged, different, deranged — this is unfair or accurate

Stigma effects

• Foster misunderstanding of schizophrenia, causes, and treatment

• Increases stress, and decreases the likelihood that a person will seek treatment and care

• Self-stigma prevents people from disclosing a diagnosis or seeking help

• May extend to care providers, and promote negative stereotypes and further stigmatize mental illness

• The media often depicts people with mental illness as dangerous or violent; readers draw general conclusions