Mental Disorders: Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a chronic mental disorder that affects a person’s ability to feel, behave, mental or emotional responsiveness and thinking clearly. It is referred as the “disease of the brain” (umm.edu). With the cause being unknown there are multiple factors that are believed to play a role in schizophrenia which is genetics and brain chemistry. It is characterized by disturbances in communication, perception and behavior lasting more than 6 months (umm.edu). A person suffering from Schizophrenia has deteriorated interpersonal, occupational and self-supportive abilities. It is important for people diagnosed with Schizophrenia to have a strong social support (umm.edu). There are many types of Schizophrenia like paranoid, disorganized, cationic,
2002). Schizophrenia patients have deficits in “theory of mind problems requiring conscious interpretation of someone else’s mental state (empathy) (Talamini et al. 2004). Also processing of emotional facial expression deficits seem to affect discriminative ability and name expressions (Schneider et al. 2006). It has also been suggested that abnormality in hippocampal-cortical communication via parahippocampal areas can cause specific memory deficits (Meeter et al. 2002). Large evidence has shown that damage to hippocampus causes amnesia like impairments (Meeter et al. 2002) and “a mild to moderate deficit in encoding, additional severe deficit in retrieval of episodic information” (Meeter et al. 2002) and difficulty in storing and recalling words (human-memory.net). Working memory is also a core deficit in Schizophrenia underlying diverse impairments which can cause disorganized cognitive organization, impaired goal oriented behavior, failure of self-monitoring and other phenotypic manifestations (Silver et al. 2003). Schizophrenia has many deficits and impairments associated with the disorder. However, like every disorder there is a solution, a treatment.
The goal to treating schizophrenia is to target its positive, negative and cognitive symptoms, increasing adaptive functioning so the patient can function and adjust well back into
Treatment consists of psychosocial interventions, psychotherapy TMS or ECT, psychoeducations and medications (Sommer et al. 2012). Antipsychotic drugs are only medications to effectively reduce the severity and frequency of hallucinations; it induces rapid decrease in hallucinations on severity (Sommer et al. 2012). Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is effective for auditory verbal hallucinations characterized in five aspects which are all targeted in CBT, TMS which is a strong electrical current sent through coil is also capable of reducing severity and frequency of auditory hallucinations (Sommer et al. 2012). 10%-30% show little improvement after multiple trails; 30%-60% show partial or inadequate improvement or side effects during therapy (Patel et al.