Schizophrenia Essay

The human brain is a very complex organ which has conquered the minds of many for the wonders it consistently propagates in terms of rationality, morality, sociol functioning, executive functioning and other attributes.

A simple definition taken from the oxford dictionary 2014 defines schizophrenia as a long-term mental disorder of a type involving a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behaviour, leading to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion, and a sense of mental fragmentation.

Affecting roughly equally both genders in 1% of the population and it occurs in late adolescent to early adulthood with symptoms lasting a lifetime. The symptoms are so complex that normal functioning of the brain is distorted into a psychotic phase and contracted range of emotional expression as stated in the Mental illness fellowship of Australia.

To deconstruct the underlying causes, the treatment and or definition of Schizophrenia is beyond the scope of this essay yet a brief understanding of the concept in how Schizophrenia has been defined or classified as a syndrome will be portrayed in this paper as well as looking at one of the cognitive impairments seen in sufferers of schizophrenia will be analysed.

Jim van Os & Shitij Kapur. (2009) lay emphasis on the facts that symptoms are quite easily to distinguish from the different categories of psychotic disorders based on duration, dysfunction, delusions and mania, yet analysis from research reveals that a Schizophrenic attack is categorized with many several overlying sets, Psychosis that includes delusions and hallucinations also referred to as the positive symptom dimension and...

... middle of paper ...

...ent test such as word-generation tests and the Stoop Test, Liddle accomplishes that impaired planning and initiation of activity and impaired selection of activity are the two main types of executive deficits predicting the poor social and occupational performances. The Stoop test also represents that negative symptoms are revealed as poor communication skills, absence of emotional stimuli and reduced voluntary movement.

Green MF. (1996), illustrates the underlying predictors of poor social performances and quality of life were executive function deficits and long-term verbal memory deficits. These are both areas that are substantially affected in schizophrenia. Also according to Green, (1996) if a subject who is suffering from schizophrenia performs poorly in tasks such as Verbal memory, vigilance, and working memory, indicates impairment of learning new skills.