Schizophrenia is a mental illness with no clear origin. The condition is characterized by a chronic course, an increase in symptoms and a splitting of the psyche. Most often, pathology is diagnosed at the age of 19-30. What are the signs of the onset of the disease?
Schizophrenia is often mistakenly classified as a disease that is always inherited. However, according to medical statistics, it follows that only in 17% of cases, a child also falls ill if one of the parents has a similar diagnosis. The percentage rises sharply - up to about 70% - if both parents are sick. However, the exact and unambiguous cause of the development of schizophrenia has not yet been established.
Within the framework of this mental illness, violations always occur:
- thinking;
- will;
- emotional reactions.
By the age of about 21 years, schizophrenia is diagnosed only in men. After this age, the disease also affects women.
It is important to know that this severe mental pathology is not in every case accompanied by "disease products", that is, delirium, hallucinations, illusions.
Risk group for the development of schizophrenia
In addition to the conditional hereditary indicator, the high-risk group includes:
- people who are dominated by abstract thinking;
- those who do not know how and do not like to work in a team prefer loneliness and solo projects in their studies or work;
- people are reserved, quiet, secretive, concentrated on themselves and their inner world;
- non-companion personalities.
Of course, there is no 100% guarantee that a person who avoids the company of other people and prefers a secluded lifestyle will eventually develop schizophrenia. However, the threat of the emergence of mental pathology - this or any other - is still growing.
The first signs of the development of schizophrenia
- Any unexpected and drastic changes in the usual way of life.
- Change in interests: curiosity about pseudosciences grows, a person may unexpectedly get carried away with ufology or occultism. Often, the onset of schizophrenia is characterized by a concentration on religion, while in the past a person has never shown an interest in faith.
- Loss of interest and desire for work, self-education, for any exact or natural sciences.
- The gradual onset of thinking disorders. A person suffering from schizophrenia can talk about how the thoughts in his head move parallel to each other, that he thinks about several things at the same time, that his thinking seems to split, disintegrate into pieces.
- A person can become extremely inattentive and sloppy. It becomes very difficult to communicate with him, because he ceases to perceive information as a whole. So, for example, in a conversation, he can highlight only some certain words and moments, concentrate all his attention on them, while not grasping the essence and not perceiving the picture of the conversation as a whole.
- The craving for the creation of new words and phraseological units increases, the meaning of which is understandable only to a patient with schizophrenia.
- In communication, such people can show an increased tendency to philosophize, argue for a long time on any insignificant topics.
- Separate words and expressions appear in the text and speech, which are not related to each other in any sense.
- One of the signs of developing schizophrenia is that, while writing (or typing), a person suddenly begins to lose the endings of words, make mistakes in the correctness of gender, number or case, confuse letters in words (rearrange them), and so on. As a rule, this is done unconsciously, mistakes are not noticed or not noticed immediately.
- With the development of the disease, emotional dullness increases. A person begins to express his emotions extremely poorly and reluctantly, tries not to talk about feelings and sensations. However, this does not mean that the schizophrenic does not feel anything, quite the opposite is true. Emotions in a schizophrenic patient can be very bright and strong, but concentrated exclusively within him.
- Gradually, with schizophrenia, volitional impulses begin to decrease. From the outside, such a symptom may resemble a sign of depression, when the patient literally cannot bring himself to get out of bed, go to work / school, do household chores or favorite hobbies, take a shower, and so on.
- Lethargy and lethargy accompany schizophrenia in the early stages of the disease.
- In some cases, at the very beginning of the pathology, the patient may see illusions and hallucinations, he may have a delusional state.
The peculiarity of schizophrenia is that with this mental pathology, there is no sharp deterioration in memory. A person, on the contrary, begins to memorize everything and extremely well. He does not get confused in the events of the past, he is quite well versed in what year is outside, what time it is, and so on. Memory and intelligence in any form of schizophrenia are impaired last when the disease takes on a persistent, chronic and severe form.
