The flat mood appearance of schizophrenia - is it a real lack of emotion or is it just a difficulty in?

expressing and showing emotion?

This is a complex issue. "Flat mood appearance" that you mention can me a symptom of many psychiatric disorders. You must undertake tests which carried out to exclude other medical illnesses which may rarely present with psychotic schizophrenia-like symptoms. These tests include blood tests measuring TSH to exclude hypo- or hyperthyroidism, basic electrolytes and serum calcium to rule out a metabolic disturbances, full blood count including ESR to rule out a systemic infection or chronic disease, and serology to exclude syphilis or HIV infection; two commonly ordered investigations are EEG to exclude epilepsy, and a CT scan of the head to exclude brain lesions. Evidence of schizophrenia on an MRI shows on the , parietal cortex, tissue loss continuing at a dramatic rate into the auditory part of the brain and then onto motor areas. This sequence corresponds with the typical course of the schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia is NOT cureable. A person experiencing schizophrenia may demonstrate symptoms such as disorganized thinking, auditory hallucinations, and delusions. In severe cases, the person may be largely mute, remain motionless in bizarre postures, or exhibit purposeless agitation; (this is called catatonia). The current classification of psychoses holds that symptoms need to have been present for at least one month in a period of at least six months of disturbed functioning. A schizophrenia-like psychosis of shorter duration is termed a schizophreniform disorder. No one sign is diagnostic of schizophrenia, and all can occur in other medical and psychiatric conditions.

Flat mood may be a sign of Asperger's. The lack of demonstrated empathy is possibly the most dysfunctional aspect of Asperger syndrome.

It also depends on how long you have been flat mood to determine the diagnosis: Depression with melancholic features 鈥?melancholia is characterized by a loss of pleasure (anhedonia) in most or all activities, a failure of reactivity to pleasurable stimuli, a quality of depressed mood more pronounced than that of grief or loss, a worsening of symptoms in the morning hours, early morning waking, psychomotor retardation, anorexia (excessive weight loss, not to be confused with Anorexia Nervosa), or excessive guilt.

My advice...go see a psychiatrist and get diagnosed and organised with a treatment team (nurses, social workers, counsellors, psychologists).

everyone has emotions - sometimes their buried very deep...
hope this helps

If i can share something about myself - when my emotions are not obvious, i know there's gonna come a time when something hits me and i'm gonna have a good cry - this is when i know i'm alive...does this help any?

This is a complex question and I cannot fully explain the answer, but some of it has to do with the fact that schizophrenia is not just an emotional disease, it also is a problem with memory function. Some of the problem with expressing emotion may be a frontal lobe function and the accessing of memories about people and their relationship to us and accessing out memories and the feelings associated with them. So some of the problem has to do with integrating these various functions, which is similar to the same problem with autism, it is just that there is not as great a disconnect between knowing what is happening in the outside world.