This disease is rare but has a huge impact on life! If there are 3 situations, be sure to pay attention!

October 10th of each year is World Mental Health Day, which aims to raise awareness of the importance of mental health and popularize relevant knowledge. Today, we will take this opportunity to talk about a disease that everyone has heard of, but most people may have a little misunderstanding. That is "schizophrenia".

When talking about this disease, many friends’ reaction may be “there are several selves in my mind”, each with its own personality, but in fact, this is not the case.

Schizophrenia, also known as split thinking disorder, is a serious mental illness characterized by severe abnormalities in the patient's thinking, emotions and behavior. Patients may experience symptoms such as hallucinations, delusions, disorganized thought patterns and language disorders. These symptoms can cause patients to lose touch with reality and make it difficult for them to understand and adapt to daily life.

The World Health Organization characterizes schizophrenia as a severe impairment in the way people perceive reality and the following behavioral changes:

1. Persistent delusion: The belief that something is true remains firm despite evidence to the contrary;

2. Persistent hallucinations: The patient may hear, smell, see, touch, or feel things that are not there;

3. Experience of influence, control, or passivity: the experience that one's feelings, impulses, actions, or thoughts are not generated by oneself but are placed in or taken out of one's mind by others, or the experience that one's thoughts are being transmitted to others;

4. Confused thinking, often observed as gibberish or irrelevant speech;

5. Extremely disorganized behavior, such as seemingly doing things erratically or without purpose, or having unpredictable or inappropriate emotional responses, which interferes with the ability to organize behavior;

6. “Negative symptoms” such as minimal speech, reduced emotional experience and expression, inability to experience interest or pleasure, and social withdrawal;

7. Extreme restlessness or slowed movements and unusual body postures.

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Many people are influenced by movies and TV shows to understand split personality, but in fact it is an outdated informal term and is no longer used in psychology. What people think of as "split personality" actually refers to Multiple Personality Disorder (MPD), also known as Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). This is a rare psychological disorder characterized by the patient's feeling that he or she has two or more different personalities.

In this disorder, people may experience dissociative symptoms, with their personal experiences and personality traits splitting into two or more "personalities" that can function independently of one another and control memory and behavior. People may forget their past or present experiences and may behave in one or more different ways.

What does it mean to have schizophrenia?

According to the World Health Organization, schizophrenia affects approximately 24 million people worldwide. Another systematic review study analyzed data from more than 70 countries around the world and found that the global prevalence of schizophrenia is between 0.3% and 1%.

Compared to depression, which has a global prevalence of about 4.4% and affects 350 million people, schizophrenia is indeed relatively rare. Despite this, the impact of schizophrenia on patients is very large. From the perspective of symptoms, schizophrenia will affect the patient's cognition, thinking and behavior to varying degrees, and may lead to the inability to take care of oneself, let alone receive education and participate in work and other activities.

At the same time, due to the serious stigmatization of schizophrenia in society, there is prejudice, discrimination and exclusion against patients, which makes it difficult for them to obtain normal social support, and they often suffer from human rights violations, including neglect, abandonment and abuse. Studies have found that their early mortality rate may be 2-3 times higher than that of the general population. But in fact, schizophrenia is not incurable. Studies have found that according to actual rehabilitation treatment measures, the symptoms of schizophrenia patients will experience worsening or relief, and at least one-third of patients can fully recover. Therefore, suffering from schizophrenia means that you need to be out of society for at least a long time and receive professional intervention treatment until the doctor believes that the symptoms have been alleviated to the point where you can live a normal life.

What are the signs of schizophrenia? Can it be prevented?

The cause of schizophrenia is the result of the interaction of multiple complex factors. At present, the academic community has not reached a unified conclusion. However, in addition to innate factors such as genetic inheritance, family history and susceptibility, acquired environmental factors such as drug abuse and lifestyle are also closely related to it. Unhealthy lifestyles and long-term psychological stress may cause a person to suffer from schizophrenia. A study found that 46% of schizophrenia patients have experienced more serious psychological stress events.

The early symptoms of schizophrenia patients are mainly negative symptoms and general psychopathological symptoms. Negative symptoms refer to very little speech, becoming less talkative, unwilling to actively participate in social activities, reduced interest in things, reduced emotional experience and expression. In addition, there are some common psychopathological symptoms, such as inexplicable tension, anxiety and depression, and a tendency to be in a self-enclosed environment. A small number of patients may also have abnormal thinking and scenes or sounds that they cannot explain. However, in the early stages, patients are often aware of this, so patients and their families tend to ignore these symptoms. When the patient's self-awareness is seriously weakened, schizophrenia becomes more serious.

The study also found that the peak onset of schizophrenia in male patients is 15 to 25 years old, and in female patients it is 25 to 35 years old. The most common period of onset is late adolescence and early adulthood, which is also the period when patients experience adolescent troubles, academic pressure, employment pressure and begin to adapt to society independently. The above early symptoms are also easily mistaken for emotional distress caused by short-term stress and troubles, thus delaying the best time for treatment.

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Domestic scholars often refer to the period from the early onset of schizophrenia to the first psychiatric treatment as the "pre-psychiatric treatment period". The shorter this period is, the better the effect of the intervention treatment for the patient. After the intervention, the patient's cognitive function is less impaired and their social function is relatively better.

Therefore, for schizophrenia, a disease whose cause and treatment have not yet been completely conquered by the scientific community, the most important thing is early detection, early diagnosis and early treatment to reduce the damage caused by the disease to patients.

References

[1]WHO.Mental health systems in selected low- and middle-income countries: a WHO-AIMS cross-national analysis. WHO: Geneva,2009

[2] Janoutová, J., Janácková, P., Sery, O., Zeman, T., Ambroz, P., Kovalová, M., & Janout, V. (2016). Epidemiology and risk factors of schizophrenia. Neuroendocrinology Letters, 37(1), 1-8.

[3]Iyer, S., Jordan, G., MacDonald, K., Joober, R., & Malla, A. (2015). Early intervention for psychosis: a Canadian perspective. The Journal of nervous and mental disease, 203(5), 356-364.

[4] Liu Kai. Retrospective analysis of early clinical characteristics of 75 patients with schizophrenia who were first diagnosed[J]. Chinese Journal of Minkang Medicine, 2016, 28(17): 62-64.

[5] Yao Mingrong, Chen Aixiu, Yuan Tianyi, et al. Analysis of clinical characteristics of 57 adolescents with first-episode schizophrenia[J]. Contemporary Medicine (Academic Edition), 2008, No.145(Z1):84-86.

Author: ACC Psychology Popular Science

Review丨Tang Yicheng, Deputy Director of Beijing Zhongke Popular Psychological Health Promotion Center