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Article Index
What is Schizophrenia?
Biochemical factors
What treatment is available?
All Pages

Schizophrenia is a mental illness which affects one person in every hundred. Schizophrenia interferes with the mental functioning of a person and, in the long term, may cause changes to a person's personality.

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First onset is usually in adolescence or early adulthood. It can develop in older people, but this is not nearly as common. Some people may experience only one or more brief episodes in their lives. For others, it may remain a recurrent or life-long condition. The onset of illness may be rapid, with acute symptoms developing over several weeks, or it may be slow, developing over months or even years.

During onset, the person often withdraws from others, gets depressed and anxious and develops extreme fears or obsessions.

What are the symptoms of schizophrenia?

Major symptoms of schizophrenia include:

• Delusions - false beliefs of persecution, guilt or grandeur or being under outside control. People with schizophrenia may describe plots against them or think they have special powers and gifts. Sometimes they withdraw from people or hide to avoid imagined persecution.
• Hallucinations - most commonly involving hearing voices. Other less common experiences can include seeing, feeling, tasting or smelling things which to the person are real but which are not actually there.
• Thought disorder - where the speech may be difficult to follow; for example, jumping from one subject to another with no logical connection. Thoughts and speech may be jumbled and disjointed. The person may think someone is interfering with their mind.

Other symptoms of schizophrenia include:

• Loss of drive - where often the ability to engage in everyday activities such as washing and cooking is lost. This lack of drive, initiative or motivation is part of the illness and is not laziness.
• Blunted expression of emotions - where the ability to express emotion is greatly reduced and is often accompanied by a lack of response or an inappropriate response to external events such as happy or sad occasions.
• Social withdrawal - this may be caused by a number of factors including the fear that someone is going to harm them, or a fear of interacting with others because of a loss of social skills.
Lack of insight or awareness of other conditions - because some experiences such as delusions and hallucinations are so real, it is common for people with schizophrenia to be unaware they are ill. For this and other reasons, such as medication side-effects, they may refuse to accept treatment which could be essential for their well-being.
• Thinking difficulties - a person's concentration, memory, and ability to plan and organise may be affected, making it more difficult to reason, communicate, and complete daily tasks.

What causes schizophrenia?

No single cause has been identified, but several factors are believed to contribute to the onset of schizophrenia in some people:

Genetic factors

A predisposition to schizophrenia can run in families. In the general population, only 1 per cent of people develop it over their lifetime. If one parent suffers from schizophrenia, the children have a 10 per cent chance of developing the condition - and a 90 per cent chance of not developing it.

Disorders - Schizophrenia