Category: Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is one of the most serious types of mental illness.

Up to 80 percent of people with schizophrenia hear voices that are not really there.

Schizophrenia is one of the most serious types of mental illness.

It can cause delusions, hallucinations, confused thinking and dramatic changes in behaviour.

Patients report that hearing voices is one of the most distressing symptoms of schizophrenia.

The voices, which sound very real to the sufferer, are typically highly distracting.

They are sometimes telling the person to harm themselves or perform other disagreeable acts.

A scrambled auditory cortex

A study has used high-resolution brain scanning to probe the source of the voices in the auditory cortex.

Professor Sophia Frangou, study co-author, said:

“Since auditory hallucinations feel like real voices, we wanted to test whether patients with such experiences have abnormalities in the auditory cortex, which is the part of the brain that processes real sounds from the external environment.”

The research compared 16 people with schizophrenia to 22 healthy controls.

All listened to a range of tones to stimulate the auditory cortex.

This created a ‘tonotopic’ map, which represents how sounds are arranged in the brain spatially.

Imagine a kind of piano keyboard in the brain — the auditory cortex is something like this, with areas representing each different ‘note’ or range of frequencies.

The results showed that the auditory cortex of people with schizophrenia was more sensitive to sounds and was also more ‘scrambled’.

Professor Frangou said:

“Because the tonotopic map is established when people are still infants and remains stable throughout life, our study findings suggest that the vulnerability to develop “voices” is linked a deviance in the organization of the auditory system that occurs during infancy and precedes speech development and the onset of psychotic symptoms by many years.

This is particularly exciting because it means that it might be possible to identify potential vulnerable individuals, such as the offspring of schizophrenia patients, very early on.”

The study was published in the journal npj Schizophrenia (Doucet et al., 2019).

Schizophrenia is a serious mental disorder that involves delusions, hallucinations, problems planning and remembering, paranoia and confused thinking.

People with schizophrenia do not attempt to control their stronger emotions in the usual way, a study finds.

Most people try to regulate stronger emotions towards ones they prefer: such as reducing intense fear, anger and anxiety.

For example, when feeling very anxious, most people will try to calm down using relaxing thoughts, deep breathing or any other coping strategy they have found to work.

However, people with schizophrenia make little attempt to regulate their emotions.

The conclusions come from a study that compared the emotional experience of people with schizophrenia to a healthy control group.

The extent of people’s feelings were rated on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the strongest emotions.

Mr Ian Raugh, the study’s first author, explained how healthy people react to more negative emotions:

“…as negative emotion increases, they’re more likely to manage that.

At lower levels, say 1 or 2, you’re probably not going to do anything to change it.

But as the level of negative emotion goes up, a healthy person is much more likely to engage in efforts to change how they are feeling.”

However, people with schizophrenia do not or cannot regulate strong emotions, Mr Raugh said:

“That’s really the abnormality, that people with schizophrenia don’t seem to be trying to manage their emotions as much when their emotions are really high.”

People with schizophrenia are exhausted

The stronger the negative emotions become, the less people with schizophrenia attempt to change their emotional state.

One reason may be that people with schizophrenia do not think it will help to try.

Mr Raugh said:

“The terms we use in psychology are ‘learned helplessness’ or ‘defeatists beliefs,’ where people think ‘oh it’s not going to work even if I try so why bother,’ which is common in depression as well.

And so, there’s that aspect probably driving less attempts at higher levels.”

Another reason may be that people with schizophrenia feel exhausted.

The effort of constantly trying to change negative emotions at low levels makes the effort at higher levels almost impossible.

Mr Raugh said:

“A lot of that comes down to they’re not regulating as much when it would be most advantageous to do so.

Our future studies will try to understand more about why they would regulate less at higher levels.”

What is schizophrenia?

Schizophrenia is a serious mental disorder that involves delusions, hallucinations, problems planning and remembering, paranoia and confused thinking.

People with schizophrenia have symptoms such as:

• disorganised speech,
• disorganised behaviour and movement,
• not eating, bathing or functioning in daily life normally,
• appearing to lack emotions,
• social withdrawal,
• inability to experience pleasure,
• and suicidal thoughts.

Schizophrenia symptoms typically appear during the 20s, with the onset earlier in men than women.

Although it is not known what causes schizophrenia, it runs in families and certain factors, such as malnutrition and taking mind-altering drugs, can trigger it.

Treatment is often with a combination of antipsychotic medications and various types of psychotherapies.

During a crisis, a person with schizophrenia may require hospitalisation until the symptoms subside somewhat.

The study was published in the journal European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience (Raugh & Strauss, 2021).