Understanding Schizophrenia

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Negative Symptoms

A person with schizophrenia may have the following negative symptoms:

• Lack of self confidence
• Lack of emotions
• Colorless speaking tones
• Inappropriate reactions to events (such as laughing hysterically over a loss)
• A general loss of interest in life and the ability to experience pleasure

Lack of responsiveness and poor sociability often appear in childhood as the first indications of schizophrenia. Certain imaging techniques suggest that these findings are based on biologic changes in specific parts of the brain. In many patients, however, negative symptoms do not appear until after positive symptoms develop. Negative symptoms tend to be more common than positive symptoms in older patients and typically persist after positive symptoms have been treated.

Psychotic Symptoms

Psychotic symptoms, particularly delusions and hallucinations, are the most widely recognized manifestations of schizophrenia.

• Hallucinations. A hallucination is the experience of seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, or feeling something that doesn't really exist. Auditory hallucinations are false senses of sound such as hearing voices that go unheard by others. They are the most common psychotic symptoms, affecting about 70% of patients. One study reported that schizophrenic patients who had been profoundly deaf since birth were able to describe convincing experiences of hearing voices. Patients describe the voices as occurring all about them and that they are impossible to filter out or ignore.
• Delusions. A delusion is a fixed, false belief. It can be bizarre (such as invisible aliens have entered the room through an electric socket) or nonbizarre (such as unwarranted jealousy or the paranoid belief in being persecuted or watched).

Psychotic symptoms usually occur every now and then with periods of remission. They typically occur in men between the ages of 17 - 30 and in women between the ages of 20 - 40.