Beyond Hallucinations, This Could Be Schizophrenia’s Most Devastating Symptom (M)
A surprising brain defect could hold the key to schizophrenia’s toughest symptoms.
Category: Schizophrenia
The Cause Of Psychosis: 2 Brain Systems That Send Reality Into Chaos (M)
Psychosis is a key symptom of the most severe types of mental illness, including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
This Diet Slashes Symptoms Of Schizophrenia & Bipolar Disorder By One-Third (M)
The study was inspired by the successes achieved using the diet to treat people with epilepsy.
Artificial Intelligence Can Diagnose Schizophrenia With These Simple Questions (M)
The diagnosis of other mental health conditions by AI could soon follow.
Why Schizophrenia Causes Problems With Planning And Memory (M)
Schizophrenia can also cause delusions, hallucinations and dramatic changes in behaviour and is one of the most serious types of mental illness.
This Symptom Of Schizophrenia Is Among The Most Distressing
Schizophrenia is one of the most serious types of mental illness.
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).
The 2 Most Disabling Mental Health Conditions
The study compared 18 different mental health problems and substance use disorders.
The study compared 18 different mental health problems and substance use disorders.
Personality disorders and schizophrenia are the two most disabling mental health conditions, research finds.
The most disabling condition, schizophrenia, is one of the most serious types of mental illness.
It can cause delusions, hallucinations, confused thinking and dramatic changes in behaviour.
People diagnosed with schizophrenia lost 73 percent of their healthy lives per year to the disease, on average.
The figure is so high because people with schizophrenia often have other problems at the same time, such as a substance use disorders.
After schizophrenia, personality disorders are the next most disabling condition.
Personality disorders affect around one- in-six people in the U.S..
People with a personality disorder behave, think and feel very differently from the average person.
There are three types of personality disorder:
- Fearful or anxious.
- Emotional, dramatic or erratic.
- Eccentric or odd.
The conclusions come from a study that examined the relative impact of different mental health conditions on people’s lives.
Professor John McGrath, study co-author, said:
“Traditionally the impact of mental disorders has been presented for an entire nation, but in this study, we focussed on people with different types of mental and substance use disorders at an individual level.
We found that schizophrenia and personality disorders were the most disabling mental conditions and showed how disorders like autism, anxiety disorders and schizophrenia contribute to disability at different ages.
Our new measure known as the Health Loss Proportion (HeLP) allows us to measure the average disability for different disorders at the individual level, which means that individuals who experience more inherent disability, and more comorbid conditions, will have a higher HeLP weighting, and therefore a higher measure of disability.”
The study included data from almost 7 million people in Denmark.
It looked at 18 different mental health problems and substance use disorders.
Professor McGrath said:
“People with mental disorders lead valued and productive lives, despite a lack of social and economic support for their unmet needs.”
The study was published in the journal The Lancet Psychiatry (Weye et al., 2021).
The Childhood Events That Can Trigger Schizophrenia Symptoms (M)
Schizophrenia may occur on a spectrum, like autism, with some people experiencing transient symptoms.
The Hidden Emotional Sign Of Schizophrenia (M)
Schizophrenia is a serious mental disorder that involves delusions, hallucinations, problems planning and remembering, paranoia and confused thinking.
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).
This Fatty Acid May Halve Psychosis Risk (M)
The fatty acid may help to reduce levels of inflammation in the body.
