Schizophrenia And Self-Social Development Essay

Schizophrenia is a disabling, chronic psychiatric disorder that affects around 1-4 % of the worldwide population (Ho, Black &Andereasen, 2003) and is one of the mental disorders that least understood although it is one of the most researched disorder. Many researchers in this field neglect the fact that schizophrenia commonly begins at late adolescence as psychosis (Howard et al., 2000). Poulton et al. (2002) study was the first in psychosis literature that found continuity between adolescence psychosis and adulthood schizophrenia. Specifically in this study, Poulton et al. (2002) found that adolescences aged 11years old, had 16 times increased risk chance to developing schizophrenia at the age of 26. This result is supported by later studies
The aim of this paper is to critically consider to value of taking developmental approach to understand adolescent psychotic disorder. Therefore, firstly self-social development of adolescent will be outlined and it will be followed failure of self-social development, which is argued to be leading psychosis. Then, adolescent egocentrism will be discussed and how failure in adolescent egocentrism causes psychosis in adolescent population will be explained. In each section, attachment, trauma and environmental factors will be
Steinberg and Morris (2001) stated that identity development is obtained by peer group membership where the adolescent can comprehend their developing identity with other peers and it is observed during the separation and individuation phase of adolescence, where the person steps away from the relationship based on parental attachment and approach to peer attachment where they form identity which is distinct from parents (Lapsey et al., 1989). Researchers like Corsaro et al. (1990) and Prinstein et al. (2008) pointed out the importance of peer relationships in adolescence and these relationships consist of complicated peer influence mechanisms (Hartup,