Psychiatric Disorders: Symptoms Of Schizophrenia

Among the many psychiatric disorders, schizophrenia is one that has the least known about it. This disorder is characterized by a disruption in the individual's ability to regulate their own thoughts, emotions, and actions or rather their overall behavior. The onset of schizophrenia is not until later in an individual's life, typically beginning at the end of their teenage years extending into early adulthood. However, the time of diagnosis as well as the progression is essentially unique to each case. Schizophrenia can be described as an ill-defined problem because many of the symptoms, especially in regard to the beginning and early stages, can lead the diagnosis towards other more common disorders such as mood disorders (ie. Bipolar disorder).
The first category is called positive symptoms which are commonly described as an over functioning of one or more aspects of individual behavior, meaning that their brain is producing behavior that is more extreme compared to typical behavior (behavior from healthy humans). Hallucinations and hearing voices are two that fall into this category and are the most well known to the disorder, however, positive symptoms are not limited to the above examples. The other aspect of schizophrenic symptoms is negative symptoms, which are generally defined as an under functioning in regard to an individual's behavior, meaning that their behavior is usually reduced or absent compared to typical behavior. An example of a negative symptom is the loss of emotional expression or motivation. Along with the array of symptoms this psychiatric disorder can come with there is no definitive cause, although there are theories as to what may play a factor. With such little known about the exact cause of schizophrenia, it reduces the possibility of finding a treatment method that significantly lowers or completely rids the individual of symptomatic
Howes, Williams, Ibrahim, Leung, Egerton, McGuire, Turkheimer (2013) found which structures within the brain had a role in schizophrenia, while also inspecting the dopamine as a factor in relation the symptomatic behavior produced. The first part of the study was conducted on 12 schizophrenia patients who were deceased, involved samples from their substantia nigrae (structure in the brain involved in movement) in order to analyze the levels of tyrosine hydroxylase which is an enzyme involved in the synthesis of dopamine (Howes, et al., 2013). Along with the schizophrenic patients, there was a control group as well as a group with major depressive disorder, which was used to gauge whether the results pertained only to schizophrenia. The second part of the study was conducted on 29 diagnosed schizophrenics - 13 patients who had not taken antipsychotics for at least 3 months, 5 drug-free patients, and 16 patients who were being treated with antipsychotics; as well as a healthy control group (Howes, et al., 2013). The patients and control group underwent PET (positron emission tomography scanning) to look at the way dopamine functioned within the substantia nigrae, in order to relate it to the patient's symptomatic behavior. Resulting from the PET scans showed