Schizophrenia

About schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a common form of severe mental illness highly stigmatized and often poorly understood. The people with schizophrenia are experiencing thoughts disturbances, emotions, behavior and have difficulties in judging of what is real. This can have a major impact on the person's whole life and of his family.

Schizophrenia is caused by an imbalance of chemicals that send signals to the brain, which causes the perception (vision/hearing/thoughts) of things that are not real. The factors at the origin of this imbalance are only partially understood.

Symptoms of schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is characterized by psychotic crises (loss of contact with reality) interspersed with periods of tip blunting of emotions and introversion.

The symptoms that occur during the psychotic crises are called "positive symptoms" and include the thought disorders, delusions (false beliefs, often accompanied by paranoia) and hallucinations (mainly hear of the voices).  These symptoms are often associated with anxiety, depression and excessive activity (constant movements and agitation).

Conversely, the periods of introversion are manifested by the "negative symptoms".  These include a reduction of the emotions, a reduced verbal fluence, a low capacity for planning, establishment and/or maintenance of activities and a decline in feelings of pleasure or interest. The negative symptoms are generally the source of problems during social interactions and daily activities.

Statistics

schizophrenia affects people regardless of their ethnic origin, their culture or their social class. It usually begins in early adulthood (from 20 years), but it can occur at any time from the end of adolescence. Schizophrenia affects both men and women. Men tend nevertheless to contract slightly earlier during the life cycle. The risk of developing schizophrenia in the course of the life is approximately 1 per cent for a person.
In 2004, the World Health Organization has estimated that more than 26 million people suffered from schizophrenia, which in fact one of the 20 leading causes of disability in the world. In addition, in 2004, 30,000 deaths were attributed to this disease.

The cardiovascular diseases, including coronary heart disease, represent the main cause of death among schizophrenics. In patients with schizophrenia, cardiovascular and lung diseases represent 60% of the causes of death premature. In addition, the mortality due to cardiovascular diseases in these patients with schizophrenia is two times higher than that in general population. This excess mortality is generally attributed to the prevalence of well-known risk factors such as obesity, diabetes, hypertension, dyslipidemia or smoking. However, the schizophrenic patients have limited access to health care systems and studies show a lack of treatment of cardiovascular disease risk factors.

Schizophrenia is also one of the diseases the most expensive in the world. Associated with other psychoses, it represents 1.5 per cent ( UK ), 2 per cent (Netherlands, France) and 2.5 per cent (United States) of national health budgets 7.8

diagnosis and support

Despite significant research, no curative treatment of schizophrenia has yet been discovered. However, it is possible to treat and to greatly reduce the symptoms and to identify the "risk factors" or the "warning signs" of a new impending crisis.

Schizophrenia imposed a prolonged treatment. The latter usually involves various drugs and psychosocial treatment. A period of hospitalization is often necessary to make possible care and supervision in the course of psychotic crises.

Despite the severity of this disorder, some people can do to make the experience of only one crisis of schizophrenia and can resume a large number of their normal daily activities after a treatment and rehabilitation. Unfortunately, other people will develop painful symptoms, of long duration, which limits their ability to study, work or interact socially.

It is important that individuals with schizophrenia receive the opinion of an expert and medical care for their illness.


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