ABNORMAL PSYCHOLOGY

Diagnosing ad Treating Schizophrenia Is a Challenge to the Mental Health Profession

Name of the Student: Antoinette Washington

Name of the Instructor: Dr. Mate-Kole



Diagnosing ad Treating Schizophrenia Is a Challenge to the Mental Health Profession

Introduction

Schizophrenia is the most common of the psychoses. About 1% of people in Western countries suffer from schizophrenia at some time in their lives, and about half the inpatients in U.S. mental hospitals are schizophrenics. This syndrome was first described as a single disorder by German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin in 1896. He called it dementia praecox, dementia referring to intellectual deterioration and praecox to the fact that the symptoms first occur early in life. Lachenmeyer (2000) mentions that Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler renamed the disorder schizophrenia to express his view that a prominent feature of the disorder is a splitting of psychic functions. Ideas and feelings are isolated from one another. A patient may speak incoherently, for example, or express frightening or sad ideas in a happy manner. Contrary to some popular accounts, however, schizophrenics do not have a "split personality" in the sense of different personalities. The rare syndrome of dissociative identity disorder, once called multiple personality, is not a psychosis (Lachenmeyer, 2000).

Diagnosing and Treating Schizophrenia Is a Challenge to the Mental Health Profession

Physian often think that diagnosing and treating schizophrenia is a challenge to the mental health profession. They say that the symptoms of schizophrenia include delusions, hallucinations, thought disorders, loss of boundaries between self and non-self (Kendler, et al, 1994), blunted or inappropriate emotional expressions, socially inappropriate behavior, loss of social interests, and deterioration in areas of functioning such as social relations, work, and self-care. The symptoms fluctuate in occurrence and in severity.

Kendler, et al (1994) mentions that delusions are false beliefs, usually absurd and bizarre. Thus a patient may believe that he or she is an important historical personality, or is being persecuted by others, or has died, or that a machine controls his or her thoughts.

According to physician Hallucinations are false sensory experiences. Most schizophrenic hallucinations are auditory, but some are visual or olfactory. The content is often grandiose, hypochondriacal, or religious. Many hallucinatory voices speak of matters related to the patient's emotional problems or delusional concerns; others transmit apparently irrelevant messages.

Schizophrenia is heterogeneous in symptoms. Traditional subtypes include paranoid schizophrenia, in which delusions are prominent (see paranoia); catatonic schizophrenia, characterized by silent immobility for weeks or months (usually followed by a frenzied agitation) (Walker, et al, 2004); and hebephrenic (disorganized) schizophrenia, characterized by intellectual disorganization, chaotic language, silliness, and absurd ideas that often concern deterioration of the patient's body. In practice, most patients have some symptoms consistent with each of these categories. Many researchers believe that schizophrenia consists of different disorders that have not yet been distinguished and that do not correspond to the traditional subtypes (Walker, et al, 2004).

In words of medical scholars the numbers of patients diagnosed with dementia praecox rose, although the diagnosis was applied somewhat differently in various settings. Europeans have tended toward a narrower and ...