Schizophrenia Essay

Schizophrenia is a psychiatric behavioral disorder that causes patients to causes a split from reality in patients. Symptoms include disorganized thinking, inability function socially, inability to distinguish between allusions and reality, agitated body movements, hallucinations, and delusions. This is a chronic, severe, and disabling brain disorder that occurs in about 1% of the population. There is no cure for schizophrenia. Treatments include antipsychotic medications that come with a slew of negative side effects, psychosocial treatments, illness management skill therapy, and cognitive behavioral therapy. Schizophrenia is often accompanied by substance abuse, so rehab often comes along with treatment of the disorder. Nobody really knows exactly what causes schizophrenia, which is one of the things that makes it so interesting. It appears to be a culmination of many different factors. These many factors include: genetics- schizophrenia is up to 80% heritable (Picker, Psychiatric Times), prenatal complications, slower fetal growth, which sometimes indicates cerebral atrophy, hypoxia near the time of birth, prenatal infections, childhood infections, childhood antecedents, substance abuse, and life experiences.

The thing about schizophrenia is that it is a psychological disorder, so it’s going to depend on the brain. There are so many things that could go wrong in the brain during daily activities, it’s a wonder not everybody has a psychological problem. If you hit your head falling off a ladder, that could cause an injury to the brain that could completely debilitate an otherwise perfectly healthy individual. There is slight evidence to linkage between celiac disease patients and schizophrenia patients. That might be because c...

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... child is Rh-negative. Rh incompatibility can lead to hemolytic disease, which can lead to schizophrenia. Rh incompatibility can also lead to birth complications, such as hypoxia, which also can lead to brain damage, which can obviously lead to schizophrenia.

So, in conclusion, schizophrenia is a highly complex disease that is not understood completely by anyone, but the enzyme COMT is being studied, and is seen as having a large influence on the development of schizophrenia. To address genetic factors, there is not a single factor that trumps the rest, but prenatal health is always extremely important to the mental and physical health of the patient. Prenatal factors seem to be the most prevalent in the pool of influences. We can only keep plodding down the road of research and toil, and hope that one day, we will understand that masterpiece of an organ, the brain.