Please don’t get scared by the term schizophrenia; instead, let’s go deep and understand it well. Yes, it is a chronic and severe mental disorder that affects how a person thinks, acts, expresses emotions, etc., abnormally interprets their reality. Understanding the symptoms of schizophrenia will help in the patient’s treatment effectively. Schizophrenia might cause hallucinations, delusions, and disordered thinking and behavior that impair daily functioning.
Schizophrenia is also defined by distortions in your thinking, emotions, perception, language, and behavior. It might affect educational and occupational performance worldwide. People with schizophrenia are more prone to preventable physical diseases like cardiovascular disease, metabolic disease, and infections. Discrimination, as well as violation of human rights of people who have schizophrenia, is quite common.
Types Of Symptoms Of Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia includes problems associated with thinking, behavior, and emotions. Signs and symptoms of schizophrenia might vary from person to person but usually involve common symptoms like delusions, language disability, hallucinations, or sometimes disorganized speech. Symptoms fall into five categories:
1. Positive Symptoms Of Schizophrenia (Those Abnormally Present)
- Hallucinations: It involves seeing or hearing things that don’t exist. Hallucinations can be very serious if not treated asap. Hallucinations can be happening in any of the senses, but hearing voices is one of the most common hallucinations among patients.
- Delusions: Delusions are false beliefs of a person that are not based on reality. For example, you think that you are being harmed or harassed. However, in reality, nothing at all is happening like that. Delusions occur in most people with schizophrenia.
- Extremely abnormal motor behavior: It includes childlike silliness to unpredictable anger or agitation. Behavior can have resistance to instructions, inappropriate, bizarre posture, etc.
- Disorganized way of thinking: Disorganized thinking is inferred from incoherent speech. Communication is usually impaired, and answers to questions may be partially or sometimes completely unrelated.
2. Symptoms Of Schizophrenia In Teenagers
Symptoms of schizophrenia in teenagers are pretty similar to those in adults, but the condition may be more difficult to recognize. Compared with schizophrenia symptoms in adults, teens may be less likely to have delusions but more likely to have visual hallucinations. These symptoms include:
- Withdrawal from friends and family
- A drop in performance at school
- Trouble sleeping
- Irritability
- Depressive mood
- A change in grades
- Social withdrawal
- Trouble concentrating
- Temperament flares
- Also, recreational substance use, such as marijuana, LSD, can sometimes cause similar signs and symptoms.
3. Negative Symptoms Of Schizophrenia
The negative symptoms of schizophrenia note the absence of normal behaviors in people, which include
- Lack of motivation
- Loss of pleasure in life
- Poor hygiene habits
- Poor grooming habits
- Lack of emotion
- Withdrawal from family, friends
- Refraining from social activities
- Less energy or stamina
4. Disorganized Symptoms of Schizophrenia
- Confused and disordered thinking and speech
- Quickly jumping from one thought process to the next without any logical connections between them.
- Talking in incoherent sentences that do not make sense
- Moving slowly
- Forgetting things
- Repeating movements or gestures
- Certain problems making sense of everyday sights, sounds, emotions, and feelings
5. Cognitive Symptoms Of Schizophrenia
It causes a problem in
- Proper understanding of any information and using it to make other decisions
- Focusing or paying attention
- Using their information immediately after learning it.
Schizophrenia can happen at any age, but the average age is in the late teenage years to the early 20s for men and women, the late 20s to early 30s. Women usually show first signs of the illness in their 20s and early 30s, whereas men experience initial symptoms of schizophrenia in their late teens or early 20s. Therefore, this complete informative article about schizophrenia symptoms will help you identify its signs. Consequently, you will be able to deal with it better and consult the doctor early.
Read Also: Misophonia: Symptoms And Triggers
