Faces Interactive Schizophrenia Case Study

The Faces Interactive website lets us take a look at what it really means to be diagnosed with schizophrenia, instead of the many misinterpreted beliefs that are associated with this disorder. Under the Diagnostic Overview tab, it is explained that this disorder has positive and negative symptoms. As mentioned in under the tab, the two most common positive symptoms include Delusions and Hallucinations. Often times, we might confuse the two, but they each hold very different definitions. Faces Interactive defines Delusions as, “… a firmly held believe that is not grounded in reality” (McGrawHill Higher Education, 2007, Diagnostic Overview). There are many forms of delusions including delusions of persecution, delusions of reference, and delusions of grandeur. Faces Interactive gives applicable examples that differentiate between the three, “Valerie has expressed a range of delusions including delusions of persecution – that people were plotting to hurt she and her family, delusions of
A few factors that support this include that she has no family history of schizophrenia, she has a great deal of knowledge about her illness, she portrays few negative symptoms, a late onset at about the age of 28, and she is a female. She explains how there was no severe change with her onset, “… I kinda slipped from reality into unreality without any real, sharp change. It was kind of a gradual thing” (McGrawHill Higher Education, 2007, Clinical Questions). Also, she discusses that she believes the initial psychotic break originated from her husband confessing that he did not want to have children anymore. Some factors that she experiences which point toward a negative prognosis include that she was not very social before her diagnosis, and that she had a slow onset of her illness. Overall, I believe that so far she has had a rather positive prognosis and will continue