Types Of Treatment For Schizophrenia example essay topic

Schizophrenia is one of the most serious and complex disorders of the mind. The disease is an abnormal decay of the person's mental functions. Schizophrenia is an often-misunderstood disease; it is usually confused with Multiple Personality Disorder. According to Webster's Dictionary Schizophrenia is defined as any of a group of psychotic disorders usually characterized by withdrawal from reality, illogical patterns of thinking, delusions, and hallucinations, and accompanied in varying degrees by other emotional, behavioral, or intellectual disturbances. Schizophrenia is associated with dopamine imbalances in the brain and defects of the frontal lobe and is caused by genetic, other biological, and psychosocial factors. All these factors force the person to require medical attention constantly as they cannot face the daily tasks of their lives.

Schizophrenics who also suffer from inappropriate moods, hallucinations and delusions, make them highly unpredictable to care for or treat effectively. Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that severely impacts how millions of Americans think feel and act. It is a disorder that makes it difficult for a person to tell the difference between real and imagined experiences, to think logically, to express normal emotional responses or to behave normally in social situations, also the disease has many types of medications to help its patients. Schizophrenia affects men and women equally, and either way there is always a heavy burden on the family. E. Fuller Torrey states, "Work on schizophrenia show that exactly one out every hundred people in the United will be diagnosed with schizophrenia" (3). Schizophrenia can be draining on both the person with schizophrenia and their families.

People with schizophrenia often have difficulty functioning in society at work and in school. The families have a heavy burden because they have to help out financially and make sure that medication is taken as prescribed. People who have schizophrenia were once regular people just like us before this terrible disease strikes their lives. As Nancy C. Andreasen, M.D., PH. D states in her book Brave New Brain: Conquering Mental Illness in the Era of the Genome: Scott, a regular teenage boy, started acting weird and disoriented. Young Scott had Schizophrenia.

The following is an excerpt from a letter that Scott wrote to his mother and father. 'I'm so confused. I am so scared. I can't describe this to anyone. I have to deal with this alone. I used to be one of the guys.

But now I'm an outcast. Why is this happening? What did I do? I've completely lost control over what is happening to me, but I don't even know what it is. Could it really be that I am losing my mind, like one of the people in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest? If I am, then I should just kill myself.

I don't want to keep living if it is going to be this bad the rest of my life. The causes of schizophrenia are still unknown, so it is important for it to be properly diagnosed. There are many types of treatment for schizophrenia. One type of treatment for it is a mental hospital. There is much controversy on this subject, according to Theodore Lidz, "when there is a schizophrenic in a hospital that the doctors need to work on his socialization skills. I believe that they need to know how to make decisions through participation with a group.

It would be good for the patient to help make decisions for other people. Schizophrenics at mental hospitals are at a disadvantage because they emphasize so much on patient-doctor relations and individual psychotherapy rather than socialization" (118). Other than a mental hospital, standard treatment is medication. The only problem with this is that a drug that works well for one schizophrenic may not work well for another schizophrenic, which makes make's things a lot more complicated then they already are. The most commonly used, and most effective, treatment is through the use of anti-psychotic drugs.

Theodore Lidz explains in his book The Origin and Treatment of Schizophrenic Disorders that anti-psychotic drugs reduce delusions, hallucinations, and act to diminish aggressive or odd behavior. Anti-psychotic drugs are commonly given in liquid or tablet form. The drug works by blocking the neurons' dopamine receptors (122). One type of medication used by schizophrenic patients is Neuroleptics.

There are approximately 30 neuroleptics used in North America (each may have several names so it seems as if there are more). They are usually essential to achieve control of the symptoms of the illness. The symptoms on which these drugs are working on are disorder, hallucinations, delusions, ideas that events in the environment refer to you and ideas that other people may be controlling your actions or thoughts. They do not seem to help much with some other symptoms including social withdrawal, loss of interest in the world, loss of emotional expression and lack of drive. In addition, they are usually required indefinitely after control of the symptoms has been achieved. If they are stopped the symptoms frequently reappear.

According to Thomas Szasz there are many different neuroleptics available. Some examples include trifluoperazine (Stela zine), pimozide (Or ap), flupenthixol (Fluanxol), and chlorpromazine (Largactil) for oral use, and some of these are also available for short-acting injections. Examples of long-acting (depot) injections include flupenthixol (Fluanxol), flu phenazine decanoate (Moderate), pipotiazine (Piportil L 4), and haloperidol decanoate (H aldol LA) (24). Delusions, hallucinations, and chaotic speech are all symptoms that are commonly associated with schizophrenia. According to Compton's Encyclopedia a delusion is an untrue belief that isn't logical and has no common sense. A person with schizophrenia believes that his delusions are true and it is very hard for a person to talk to him.

Delusions can cause emotional confusion and physical pain in the brain for the victims. The other most common symptom is hallucinations. Compton's Encyclopedia defines hallucinations as hearing, seeing, or sensing something that in reality doesn't exist. In regards to hallucinations Thomas Szasz says, "Schizophrenics dealing with hallucination are either communicating with deities or dead people; or seeing one's childhood or other long-past events and relating them to someone who insists that the speaker 'actually's ees them" (19).

Chaotic speech is the third of the symptoms of schizophrenia. According to, Nancy C. Andreasen, M.D., PH.D., that chaotic speech has to with the loss of organizational skills of language and ideas. On October 11, 1994, John Forbes Nash, Jr. won the Nobel Prize for pioneering work in game theory. Nash was 66 and, for most of his adult life he'd suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. Nash began his Ph. D. at Princeton in 1948 when he was just 20. While he was only 21, he wrote a 27-page doctoral dissertation on game theory.

Nash went on to MIT, and worked on economics. Shortly after his marriage in 1957, mental illness struck John Nash. He began hearing voices. For 25 years, mental illness owned John Nash. He became a ghost, wandering the halls of Princeton and suffering in some private hell. It was in the mid-1980's that Nash at last learned to manage his schizophrenia and, once again, he could do mathematics.

In a recent interview with PBS television John Nash told them about his battle with hearing voices: Initially I did not hear any voices. Some years went by before I heard voices and -- I became first disturbed in 1959, and I didn't hear voices until the summer of 1964 I think, but then after that, I heard voices, and then I began arguing with the concept of the voices. And ultimately I began rejecting them and deciding not to listen, and, of course, my son has been hearing voices, and if he can progress to the state of rejecting them, he can maybe come out of his mental illness. In conclusion, schizophrenia is a disease that is being more understood as the days go by. As more is learned about the disease and how it affects the brain of those who suffer from it better treatments will be discovered. Even with the best treatment, support from family and friends, is crucial in maintaining normality to the life of those with schizophrenia.

Recently schizophrenia had come into the headlines of newspapers and magazines because of the movie about John Forbes Nash, A Beautiful Mind. In an article in Newsweek entitled, "National Alliance for the Mentally Ill praises 'Beautiful Mind' " which stated that the movie was the, "Most outstanding contribution to public understanding of mental illness" (1). Schizophrenics still have a long way to go but there is still hope, but at the moment schizophrenia is an illness that like most others can be treated, but cannot be cured.