SCHIZOPHRENIA

Schizophrenia

Introduction

Schizophrenia is a devastating mental illness, and one of a larger class of psychotic disorders defined by the presence of delusions (false beliefs) and/or hallucinations (sensory perceptions without external sensory input). Schizophrenia may also be characterized by disorganized speech and behavior and by negative symptoms such as social, cognitive, and emotional withdrawal. Sensationalized accounts of dangerous, violent, and criminal behavior committed by schizophrenic persons have proliferated through the popular media; and the assumption of schizophrenia-associated crime and violence has contributed to public fear, stigma, social rejection, and even the denial of services and programmatic funding to schizophrenic individuals. In reality, most schizophrenic persons are not criminal or violent.

Discussion

The transformation of the madness called as psychosis began during the second half of the nineteenth century. The follies were originally defined as primary disorders of intellectual functions leading to a displacement of behavioral and psychosocial competence. This broad definition allowed that the follies are classified between epilepsy, delusional melancholic depression, acute organic brain pictures and even dementia. After the second half of the century, the researchers of psychology and other factors cause a powerful ideological fragmentation of the group of follies. That is the main reason why people can easily classify the pure disorders of intellectual functions such as the diagnosis of dementia praecox or schizophrenia and paranoid states, emotional functions which lead to manic depression and volitional functions that generate more psychotic disorders. A second cleavage plane divides the psychosis according to whether or not impairment of consciousness (ranked among the first to acute organic states). Finally, a third plane separates the neurological functional psychoses such as epilepsy and neurosyphilis. . (Serper et al., 2000)

These planes are made ??according to clinical features of synchronous and later under the influence of the theory of degeneration which deals with the family characteristics. However, natural fluctuations in the course of such pictures create difficulties for classifiers in their desperation to postulate the existence of a single psychosis. In 1863, Kalhbaum suggests longitudinal or diachronic definition of psychosis. Twenty years later this idea was adopted by Kraepelin, who used the course and prognosis of the disease as a diagnostic criterion and questions the discriminative value of symptoms. It neglected the phenomenology of the psychosis which is exacerbated by the emergence of psychodynamic movement in an effort to emphasize the psychological origins of the disease. Bleuler combined the descriptive psychiatry and psychotherapy in his work and coined the term schizophrenia. Although an impressive descriptive beauty was that Bleuler's book generates a blurred conception of the disease and so-called primary symptoms which are reluctant to operationalization. Adolf Meyer takes this release of schizophrenia to the United States of America, which achieved great success and called as schizophrenia Border States. This curious cultural fact added to the marked expansion of psychoanalysis by explaining the poor contribution in the knowledge of this disease between 1920 and 1970. (McKenna, 1994)

However in Europe, due to the extraordinary descriptive work of Willy Mayer-Gross, Karl Schneider and Kurt Schneider survives a medical clinical concept ...