Schizophrenia

The term “schizophrenia” is less than one hundred years old but the disease was first recognized by Dr. Emile Kraeplin in 1887. Although being identified in 1887, schizophrenia has been around since the existence of man. Writings from ancient Egypt, known as the Book of Hearts, reveal that schizophrenia, along with other mental disorders such as depression, were common in that time and they had their own methods of treatment. However, these treatments were often extreme and deadly to the patients; one practice actually being to drill holes into the patient’s skull in the hopes of releasing the demons possessing that individual.

But today, we have developed actual methods of treating these mental illnesses through years of research and studies. Schizophrenia is a severe psychological disorder that is characterized by a fragmented thought process. The term schizophrenia comes from the Latin words schizo, meaning split, and phrene, meaning mind, which would be coined by a Swiss psychiatrist named Eugen Blueler in 1911. This has led people to come to the false conclusion that it is a multiple personality disorder when it is not. People diagnosed with schizophrenia suffer from their mind being split from reality, which is exacerbated by severe hallucinations.

Approximately 2.2 million adults in the United States, just over one percent of the population 18 years or older, have schizophrenia. Schizophrenics usually exhibit signs of disordered thought, difficulty verbalizing their thought, emotional instability, abnormal psychomotor skills, and anti-social behavior. This illness is one of the more treated mental disorders around the nation. About one half of the patients in mental hospitals are people with schizophrenia. Peop...

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...d into as a cause of schizophrenia are psychological and sociocultural factors. One psychological explanation being the diathesis model, which supports the idea of schizophrenia being hereditary but believe it is only actively engaged by exposure to stress. Supporters of this theory might suggest a reduction of stress in the environment as a way to treat the illness. There are also many scientists who believe schizophrenia is caused by sociocultural factors. This theory emphasizing that the lower class is more susceptible to the disorder. They would suggest that the individual be exposed to new relationships with people to slide them back into reality. But in the end, the truth is that we don’t know what causes schizophrenia. All of this is just theory. However, with each day brings new possibilities and further progression in the fields of medicine and psychology.