Schizophrenia

Just felt like writing a bit on schizophrenia today. I've got a patient on my caseload who had a stroke a couple of months ago and has a history of schizophrenia. Before I studied about this psychiatric illness, I remembered that I used to think it was all about having multiple or split personalities. But it turned out that that was more a myth perpetrated by the media than the truth. Schizo is actually more accurately defined as the splitting of mental functions - a discrepancy between thinking and feeling. The jury is still out as to what causes it but there is probably a genetic link to it and relates to a chemical imbalance in the brain. Many suffer from debilitating hallucinations and delusions which could be firm convictions of what they are perceiving even when you show them evidence that indicate otherwise. 

Check out this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H_jYqSA_fJk

There is nothing scary about mental illness. I believe there is a continuum running from 'normal people'  (what is 'normal anyway?) to people who have psychiatric disorders e.g. obsessive compulsive disorder, schizophrenia, personality disorders etc. Interestingly (for me), people with mental disorders do develop speech and language difficulties since their communication with people is often negatively affected. They might even be unable to speak or have severely disorganised speech ('word salads'). Next week, I'm going to try to find time to assess my patient to try to get a reliable yes/no response and to assess his level of understanding. Since his stroke two months ago (which appeared to be quite a serious one), he had no spoken output at all and his level of understanding has been a big question mark for the team. So no one really knows how much he really understands since he can't really gesture or talk. Hope I'll get somewhere with him next week!