Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a disabling mental disorder that affects approximately 10th the population worldwide. People with schizophrenia frequently experience hallucinations, delusions, disordered thinking, movement disorders, emotional numbness, social withdrawal, and cognitive deficits. These symptoms can hinder a person's ability to perform everyday functions, such as hold a job and maintain normal social relationships. When combined with medication, family-oriented therapy interventions have been beneficial for people with schizophrenia.
There are few programs, however, that are tailored to the needs of minorities.is a disabling mental disorder that affects approximately 10th the population worldwide.
As with many mental disorders, the causes of schizophrenia are poorly understood. Friends and family commonly are shocked, afraid or angry when they learn of the diagnosis. People often imagine a person with schizophrenia as being more violent or out-of-control than a person who has another kind of serious mental illness. But these kinds of prejudices and misperceptions can be readily corrected.
Expectations become more realistic as schizophrenia is better understood as a disorder that requires ongoing -- often lifetime -- treatment. Demystification of the illness, along with recent insights from neuroscience and neuropsychology, gives new hope for finding more effective treatments for an illness that previously carried a grave prognosis.
Schizophrenia is characterized by a broad range of unusual behaviors that cause profound disruption in the lives of people suffering from the condition, as well as in the lives of the people around them. Schizophrenia strikes without regard to gender, race, social class or culture.