What is Schizophrenia?
What is Schizophrenia?
What is Schizophrenia?
Schizophrenia is a severe long-term mental health condition. Doctors refer to schizophrenia as a type of psychosis. This means that the person may not always be able to distinguish their own thoughts and from reality.
Different types of Schizophrenia?
Paranoid schizophrenia
- This is the most common form of Schizophrenia. It can develop a lot later in life than other types. Symptoms include hallucinations and delusions however no affect in your emotions or speech.
Hebephrenic schizophrenia
- This is also known as ‘disorganised schizophrenia.’ Usually develops from the age of 15-25 years old. Symptoms can include disorganised behaviour and thoughts, short lasting delusions and hallucinations. Individuals who are experiencing this will often show little or no emotions in their facial expressions, tone and mannerisms.
Catatonic schizophrenia
- This is the rarest schizophrenia diagnosis, switching between unusual and sudden movement. For example, switching between very active or very still.
Unspecified schizophrenia
- People with this type of schizophrenia are experiencing all symptoms but do not fit into any category.
What are the symptoms?
- Hallucinations, hearing or seeing things that do not exist
- Delusions, beliefs not based on reality
- Social anxiety
- Struggle with everyday activities such as completing household chores
- Lack of motivation
What can cause schizophrenia?
Experts believe Schizophrenia is caused by environmental factors and genetics. Unfortunately, certain events can happen in an individual’s life that is seen as a traumatic experience. Therefore, this can be a trigger. (NHS, 2019)
Treatment available?
You are not alone. There are multiple treatments available and antipsychotic medication. These help to maintain symptoms by affecting the brain neurotransmitter dopamine.
Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT)
- CBT looks deeply into your thoughts and feelings. It aims to help change negative thinking patterns into positive ones as well as recognising when you’re becoming unwell. It looks at managing your feelings and symptoms better, so that you can your life to the fullest and focus on being happy. Do not let mental health bring you down, you are stronger than you think.
Arts Therapy
- This type of therapy takes a more creative approach where activities such as music, art or drama are used to help express yourself in a safe therapeutic environment. If you have trouble expressing your feeling through words sometimes actions can speak louder than words and have proven to be just as effective as talking therapies.
Support around you?
In difficult times like this it is important to not distance yourself from your loved ones even though you may feel like that is the best thing to do. Reach out and allow family members and friends to be there for you and help you on your good and bad days.
Self care
Make sure you are still looking after yourself to the best of your ability. This means regular exercising, healthy balanced diet, taking medications on time, maintaining recovery and keeping up with your daily routine.
Patient story
John Smith was diagnosed with schizophrenia at the age of 35, after seeking help from a psychiatrist. As well as doing assessment and analysing symptoms such as hallucinations and extreme paranoia. It was highly recommended that Cognitive Behavioural Therapy would be most beneficial for him. This way he is able to verbally express his feelings as well as learning coping mechanisms and rehabilitating himself back into society. He believes that his traumatic experience of his wife cheating on him and leaving the country triggered his mental breakdown. This left him with all the stress of dealing with lawyers and finalising his divorce, he had no help or support from his family which made matters worse. John felt all alone. Due to this, he stopped attending work, stopped looking after himself. After a few months at therapy John has manged to improve as he has got a new job and is surroundings himself a supportive system of friends and genuinely feels a lot happier. This just shows that with the right support and guidance provided John’s mental health has improved and will continue to do so.
Please contact we are human counselling for specialised treatment.
www.wearehumancounselling.com
By Kiran Sahota
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