Psychological Disorders

Sometimes when we think of a person with a mental disorder we think of severe intellectual disability and leave it at that close-minded opinion. The DSM-IV, the U.S. standard reference for psychiatry, includes over 300 different manifestations of mental illness. (1) The people with some of these disorders may be your banker, your dentist, your professor, or even someone in your family. I chose Schizophrenia, Bipolar, Compulsive Hoarding, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and Alzheimer's disease because these are diseases which I have been exposed to.

A dear friend of my father had schizophrenia, a lifelong mental disorder believed to have a genetic tendency that is typically diagnosed between the ages of sixteen to thirty. There is not really a known trigger for this disease and there is no medication to stop it. The symptoms related to Schizophrenia can be paranoid delusions, hallucinations, disoriented thinking, no expression of feelings, trouble keeping concentration on a task, and many more. There are medications on the market that can reduce the amount of symptoms although they do not cure the disease.There can be medication related symptoms some of them are weight gain, sometimes symptoms similar to Parkinson's disease, and facial tics. There are treatments outside of medication to help with managing this disease such as: psychosocial therapy, rehabilitation programs, family education, and self-help groups.With medication and treatment people with schizophrenia can go on as a normal people functioning in society.The most serious problem with schizophrenia is they may have a delusion that someone is trying to harm them or their family and may go to extreme measures to try and protect themselves.

The second one is a fr...

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...d tangles with stopping neurotransmitters from being able to travel and with shrinking of the brain. It has some symptoms like: loss of memory, disorientation, loss of speech, loss of planning, etc. Alzheimer’s affecting learning and memory may start up to twenty years before a diagnosis is made. During mild Alzheimer's the ability to communicate effectively may decline due to decline in reading, language, and writing skills. However severe Alzheimer's where the person is no longer able to recognize family or communicate lasts one to five years. Some other symptoms associated with some patients are mood swings, aggressive behavior, depression, anxiety, and wandering. There are currently no medications to stop Alzheimer's from running its course; however there are medications to help temporarily minimize symptoms. The most dangerous part of Alzheimer's is wandering.