Battling Schizophrenia

By Yvonne Nahat

Getting a schizophrenic to the doctor is no easy matter. And it should not be. Questions of personal liberty and psychic welfare are to be considered.

I have been a schizophrenic for eight years and I lived in what traditional medicine terms denial. I refused help from family members and friends over the years. I refused to see doctors, although I have been in and out of mental institutions six times. Doctors however, have also committed the classic mistakes that can be made with a schizophrenic. The cold methods of traditional medicine should be considered skeptically when wanting to help a schizophrenic. I remember screaming at my doctors in one of the clinics that I was not “ill” but “mad” quoting Nietzsche that my “sickness” is “my great health”. Intuitively I must have known that a psychosis is not just an illness parse but also itself a part of a massive healing process of the psyche and soul.

More often than not a schizophrenic will not go to a doctor of his or her own accord. Usually family or friends are the ones who manage to get the person undergoing a psychosis to get medical help. The burden frequently rests on the ones closest to the psychotic. They are the only ones willing to put up with all the hurt, pain and trouble a schizophrenic puts his or her family and friends through.

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By Groshan Fabiola

People generally call for the doctor if they see strange behaviors in one of their family members. Such episodes can occur only once in a life time or might be more frequent. Pay attention to all the strange things you see because they might be the symptoms of schizophrenia.

People suffering of schizophrenia will have an important change in their personality, they will be terrified about the fact that they hear voices or see things that are not real and they will have difficulties of controlling their own thoughts because of all these.

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By Groshan Fabiola

It is known that no single symptom is specific to schizophrenia, so, in order to put a diagnosis, there must be some conditions present. We can mention 3 conditions. A condition is about certain symptoms that are present for at least six months even in the absence of active flare-ups, and include symptoms like marked social withdrawal, peculiar behavior, vague and incoherent speech, and other symptoms of disturbed thinking. The second condition is about the presence of at least one active flare-up lasting a month or less, consisting of at least two characteristic symptoms, like hallucinations, delusions, disorganized thinking and other. The third condition is about particularly bizarre delusions or hallucinations that appear in patients even in the absence of other characteristic symptoms.

Symptoms that occur in schizophrenia can also appear in other psychological and medical conditions. These symptoms include delusions, hallucinations, disorganized and incoherent speech, and bizarrely disorganized or catatonic behavior.There are some conditions that resemble schizophrenia. Depression can sometimes occur together with somatic delusions which means that depression comes with delusions that focus on a physical abnormality or disease that isn’t real.People with bipolar disorder can experience during the manic phase paranoia and delusions of grandeur. There are also the schizophrenia-like psychoses, conditions that may be variations of entirely different diseases, and are classified as schizoaffective disorder, schizophreniform psychosis, and atypical and brief reactive schizophrenia.Alcohol and drug abuse can also trigger psychosis, and it is important that doctors distinguish psychosis triggered by drugs or alcohol from a schizophrenic episode.Encephalitis, neurosyphilis, thyroid disorders, cancr in the central nervous system, Huntington’s disease, multiple sclerosis, stroke, Wilson’s disease and other diseases can also be causes of psychotic symptoms.It was seen that some medications, because of the side effects they bring may induce psychosis, and this is usually observed in elderly patients.

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