Newer Schizophrenia Drugs example essay topic

372 words
Schizophrenia is a psychotic disorder characterized by a loss of contact with the environment, by noticeable deterioration in the level of functioning in everyday life, and by disintegration in the level of functioning in everyday life, and by disintegration of personality expressed as disorder of feeling, thought, and conduct. It is also called dementia praecox. Schizophrenia affects approximately 1 percent of the population worldwide, including more than 2 million Americans. It occurs equally in men and women.

The disorder is rare in children. There is often no cure for the illness, but working closely with your doctor and other mental health professionals, you can often successfully manage schizophrenia. The hallucinations that a schizophrenic goes through are auditory and visual. Command hallucinations involve hearing voices telling the individual to do certain acts which are usually negative (Gordon, 2003) In 1979, Beeby's 17 year old son started to hallucinate.

They found out that he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. His condition worsened as he started to believe that God wanted his mother and his sister Susan to die. On February 1981, Beeby arrived at home and found her son lying in a pool of blood. He took two dinner knives and stabbed his eyes out (Nichols and others, 1995). A 17 year old boy who could have lived a perfectly normal life ended up with the most horrible death. Schizophrenia is extremely dangerous and deadly.

The Senate Budget Subcommittee on Health debated on a policy which could save taxpayers $17 million annually and reduce the human toll of mental illness by allowing unrestricted access to expensive new drug therapies for schizophrenia. The Department of Health Services' Medi-Cal Program, in a misguided effort to contain costs, currently requires individuals with schizophrenia to use older, less effective, but cheaper medications before newer treatments can be tried (MHA, 1997). Newer schizophrenia drugs reported to cause fewer side effects may not live up to their reputation, suggests a new study. Researchers say they found little difference in nerve problems between newer and older schizophrenia drugs, but not everyone agrees. The study does show the new drugs to be somewhat more effective.