Schizophrenia is known to be one of the most serious and frightening of all mental disease. It is a chronic and severe neurological brain disorder estimated to affect 23 million people worldwide. It is more common among males affecting 12million, than female 9 million. Schizophrenia also commonly affects men and starts at the earlier age in men than in females. The name schizophrenia stems from the early observation that the illness is demonstrated by “the disconnection or the splitting of psychic functions.” (Green, 2001). There is a misconception that this illness is characterized by a split personality and that is not the case.
Schizophrenia is associated as a serious mental disorder in which people interpret reality abnormally. It affects how a person thinks, feels, and behaves. People with schizophrenia may result in some combination of hallucinations, delusion, and disorganized thinking and behavior that impairs their daily functioning, and can be disabling to a person.
The disease is associated with quite a few negative symptoms. A lack of insight, which is the failure to appreciate that symptoms are not real or caused by illness. Hallucination is one of the symptoms that is a perception without a stimulus, it can occur in any sense; touch, smell, taste, or vision, but hearing voices are the most common.
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The auditory hallucination of voices may speak directly to the patient, comment on the patients actions, or discuss the patient among themselves. It can cause a person to have delusions; a false belief that conflicts with reality or misinterpretation of events, which can also be associated with paranoia. A person with schizophrenia can develop a failure to use language in a logical and coherent ways, which can manifests as distorted or illogical speech, which is known as a thought disorder.
For example, a person can proceed in one direction talking about something, but suddenly go off in a totally different direction with no logical chain of thought. The negative symptoms of schizophrenia include symptoms of social withdrawal, self-neglect, loss of motivation and initiative, emotional blunting, mood disorder, and paucity of speech.
Although, there is no cure for schizophrenia it is managed and treated with medication, supportive therapy, self-help strategies, and coping with schizophrenia is a lifelong process. Research has not identified one single factor, but is thought that an interaction between genes and environmental factors may cause schizophrenia.
The first section will discuss the causes associated with schizophrenia that may be cause by a combination of factors, one being genetics, second being that the brains neurotransmitter are abnormal, and the other being environmental. The next section will provide an overview of the differences of schizophrenia in how men and women differ in terms of age onset, symptom expression, and neurobiological factors.
The next section will go over treatment options for men and women to try and determine if estrogen can be the different in treatment between the genders. The next section will go into how new research furthers understanding of synapse formation can offer a new direction in the development of treatment to correct key molecular abnormality in schizophrenia.
Lastly, the paper will summarize the findings on schizophrenia that is multifactorial in origin. Pinpointing that genetic and environmental contributions are likely an important role in the manifestations of this disorder. Identifying the molecular cause of schizophrenia can be analyzed for the possible direction in future research on schizophrenia.
