Can anybody tell me wht is schizophrenia?

Schizophrenia is a severe brain disease that interferes with normal brain and mental function鈥攊t can trigger hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, and significant lack of motivation. Without treatment, schizophrenia affects the ability to think clearly, manage emotions, and interact appropriately with other people. It is often disabling and can profoundly affect all areas of your life (for example, becoming unable to work or go to school). Being told that you or someone you love has schizophrenia can be frightening or even devastating. The best way to improve your quality of life with schizophrenia is to learn as much as you can about this condition and then adhere to the recommended treatment.

There are several types of schizophrenia, and the specific types are diagnosed based upon symptoms. The most common type is paranoid schizophrenia, which causes fearful thoughts and hearing threatening voices.

Schizophrenia does not involve multiple personalities and is not the same condition as dissociative identity disorder (also called multiple personality disorder or split personality).

A term coined by Bleuler, synonymous with and replacing dementia praecox; a common type of psychosis, characterized by abnormalities in perception, content of thought, and thought processes (hallucinations and delusions) and by extensive withdrawal of interest from other people and the outside world, with excessive focusing on one's own mental life; now considered a group or spectrum of disorders rather than a single entity, with distinction sometimes made between process schizophrenia and reactive schizophrenia. The 鈥渟plit鈥?personality of schizophrenia, in which individual psychic components or functions split off and become autonomous, is popularly but erroneously identified with multiple personality, in which 2 or more relatively complete personalities dominate by turns the psychic life of an individual.

Schizophrenia is the most prevalent psychosis, affecting some 2 million Americans. The annual cost of the disease to the U.S. economy is estimated at $65 billion, of which $46 billion reflects lost productivity of patients and their caregivers. The lifetime incidence risk is about 1%. Onset is typically gradual, without an obvious precipitating cause. Early symptoms include shortened attention span, memory deficits, and diminished ability to make decisions. Most patients become ill before age 40. Psychotic symptoms persist for months or years, and there is a lifelong risk of relapse. Cognitive malfunctions are typically accompanied by reduced energy level, flat or depressed affect, anhedonia, and abulia. Virtually all patients display impoverished thought content, social withdrawal, and impairment of occupational functioning, and even with intensive psychotherapy and drug treatment about 25% require custodial or institutional care. Although some persons with schizophrenia become assassins or mass murderers, the vast majority pose no threat to society; about 10% commit suicide. Neurophysiologic studies have shown generalized limbic lobe and prefrontal cortical abnormalities, abnormal smallness of the thalamus, and changes in signal intensity in adjacent white matter. Brain imaging inconsistently demonstrates structural or physiologic abnormalities in the prefrontal cortex, cingulate cortex, temporal cortex, and hippocampal formation. The amelioration or exacerbation of schizophrenia by certain pharmacologic agents seems to indicate that it represents a malfunction of neuronal systems using dopamine, serotonin, glutamate, and +-aminobutyric acid (GABA) as transmitters or modulators. Genetic studies suggest that susceptibility to schizophrenia is inherited as a complex of variations affecting several genes. According to the neurodevelopmental hypothesis, a brain lesion is present or acquired early in life but does not fully manifest itself until late adolescence or early adulthood, when it triggers abnormalities of neuronal proliferation, axonal outgrowth, cell migration, cell survival, synaptic regression, or myelination. Psychotherapy and behavioral therapy are inconsistently effective in the treatment of schizophrenia. Neuroleptic drugs shorten episodes of acute psychosis, limit the need for institutional care, and reduce the risk of relapse, but their long-term use is associated with serious side effects, particularly tardive dyskinesia. Newer agents such as clozapine, olanzipine, quetiapine, and risperidone are more effective in improving cognitive function and less likely to induce extrapyramidal side effects. Persons with schizophrenia frequently stop taking their medicine, and it is estimated that at any given time only one-half of them are receiving medical treatment or supervision.

Origin
[schizo- + G. phrTn, mind]

acute schizophrenia
ambulatory schizophrenia
catatonic schizophrenia
childhood schizophrenia
disorganized schizophrenia
hebephrenic schizophrenia
latent schizophrenia
paranoid schizophrenia
process schizophrenia
pseudoneurotic schizophrenia
reactive schizophrenia
residual schizophrenia
simple schizophrenia
Its a psychological disorder.
It is a mental illness.You hear voices and think bad thoughts.
My reletives have had it it is awful.
my mum
ITS LIKE A JEKYLL AND HYDE THING..THE PERSON HAS A SPLIT PERSONALITY....FREAKY AND SCARY POO THAT IS!!
Isn't that where the person hears voices as though people are really in the room talking to him or her?