Dangerous Mind - Psychology

Since I've chosen to major in psychology, I've chosen to do my paper on something that pertains to my major. In this case the mental disorder schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a severly disabilitating disease that has stricken the lives of almost two million people in the United States alone (Keefe 20). Since this disease is so devastating the majority of people that suffer from it either live on the streets or in mental institutions.

In fact, forty percent of the beds in American mental hospitals are occupied by patients with schizophrenia (Hamilton 145). According to Hamilton the overall chances of a person to develop the disease is one in a hundred (145). There are three distinct types of schizophrenia that are diagnosed in today's society. These are disorganized, catatonic, and paranoid schizophrenia.Disorganized schizophrenia can start to show signs in early adolescents. These people portray inappropriate behaviors and emotions.

For instance they may laugh at something like a close friend dieing or cry on a funny part of a movie. Disorganized schizophrenics also talk in a nonsensical manner. They make up their own language or just talk backwards. Catatonic schizophrenia is set apart from the others because of the persons with it unique catatonic, or motionless, state.

These people spend lomg periods of time weeks, months, and occasionally years motionless or in other words "dead to the world" (Hamilton 120). When they do snaqp out of their catatomic state they are extremly hostile and aggressive. Last is paranoid schizophrenia which is characterized by the false beliefs or delusions the person has. For example the thought that the FBI planted a secret microchip in their brain and is controlling them. Alomg with these specific types of schizophrenia are some symptoms that pertain to all schizophrenics.Firstoff, all people diagnosed with schizophrenia have perceptual difficulties, that is, they sufer from hallucinations.

A hallucination is a false sensory experience, such as seeing things, hearing things, and even feeling things that aren't really there. Hallucinatioms have a compelling sense of reality to the persons who suffer from them. Auditory hallucinationsare by far the most common form of hallucinatiom in schizophrenia. They are so characteristic of the disease that a person with true auditory hallucinations should be assumed to h...

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...f the problem and therfore were removed. Instead of helping the schizophrenic, though, it just took what shreds of personality they had left and left them like zombies.

Times have changed and extinsive research is done on all theoretical treatments before they are administered to any real patients. The most important and helpful treatment used today is that of drugs. Drugs used to treat schizophrenia are called antipsychotics. Keefe pointed out that antipsychotics reduce symptoms of the disease, shorten a patients stay in the hospital, and reduce the chances of rehospitalization (145). Persons with schizophrenia, when entering psychiatric hospitals, used to stay for several weeks or even months.

With these new antipsychotic drugs, though, the stay has been reduced to just days. In fact a person who takes the drugs has a 3-out-of-5 chance (60 percent) of not being rehospitalized (Keefe 164). These antipsychotics work by blocking certain receptors of certain types of neurotransmitters in the brain. For instance chlorpromazine is an atipsychotic that blocks the receptorsfor dopamine, which as I explained is believed to be the cause of most symptoms of schizophrenia (Anderson 97).