World Schizophrenia Day 2020: Causes, symptoms and treatment of Schizophrenia
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Schizophrenia is a serious mental disorder that affects how the brain normally functions. It interferes with the person’s ability to act, think, or feel. To fight the stigmas associated with it and create awareness among people for this mental disorder, World Schizophrenia Day is observed on May 24 every year.
This is a chronic and severe mental disorder that affects the way a person thinks, feels, and responds to the situation. Since it is not very common like other mental disorders, it becomes all the more important to create awareness about it since the symptoms can be highly disabling.
A common myth surrounding schizophrenia is that people suffering from it have a split personality. However, this is completely untrue. Schizophrenia patients have 1just one personality, just like everyone else. Common symptoms of schizophrenia include confused thinking, delusions, and hallucinations.
The general cause of schizophrenia is unknown. Although this condition can occur due to various reasons, vulnerability to schizophrenia can be inherited. The onset of its symptoms can be attributed to many societal ramifications. Apart from heritability, another possible cause of schizophrenia is the overproduction of dopamine in the body. Stress and drug abuse can increase the risk of this grave mental disorder.
It begins from being unable to differentiate between what’s real and what’s not. These include seeing or feeling things that others cannot. Termed as hallucinations, the person most often hears voices in their heads. Responding to these voices, they might be murmuring too, or respond to these voices with anger. The hallucinations might be visual, olfactory, and tactile too.
Then there might be delusions. These are easily proved wrong beliefs that seem strange to other normal people. Like the person might feel he/she is being stalked while it isn’t so. They might also feel that others are trying to attack them etc.
The person affected faces trouble concentrating. Their thoughts might be confused and this results in disorganised speech too. Contrary to the belief, people with this disorder are usually not violent.
Treatment of Schizophrenia:
Most individuals require daily living support, a reason why family support is very important for them. Psychological assistance goes along with medication to help fasten the process of healing.
The most commonly available treatment for schizophrenia is a combination of medicine and psychological rehabilitation. Anti-psychotic drugs are prescribed to patients to cope with their symptoms and manage their schizophrenic episodes of hallucinations and delusions.
According to Mayoclinic, Schizophrenia requires lifelong treatment even when the symptoms have subsided. To help manage the condition, medications and physiological therapy work hand in hand.