The Strengths of the genetic explanation is that research-using twins has recently found a high concordance rate for Schizophrenia in identical Twins. Also adoption studies have supported the strong link between Schizophrenia and families. The weaknesses of the genetic explanation are there is not 100% concordance of schizophrenia in MZ twins, you may have one twin who develops the illness and one who does not. It is also shown that it may be the shared environment, which causes schizophrenia in MZ twins, because twins may be treated more similarly by family, than non-identical twins.
Some researchers believe that the brain was damaged at or before the time of birth in some way, which could have caused schizophrenia. Researchers have also notices that large amounts of people born in the late winter and early spring have gone on to develop schizophrenia. The main time that the damage to the brain could occur would be in the 2nd trimester, which is between the fourth and sixth months of trimester. Torrey and peterson put forward that mothers caught a viral infection, which damaged the unborn baby’s’ brain, which means that they are likely to later go on to develop schizophrenia.
The strengths of the viral infection explanation are that people with schizophrenia have been linked with the flu epidemic in the 2nd trimester of pregnancy. Another strength is that more schizophrenics appear to be born in late winter early spring. The weaknesses of this explanation are that some schizophrenics are born in the summer months. Also a weakness is that not all researchers have found a correlation between the season of pregnancy and schizophrenia.
A Further example of the biophysical explanation is that the brain chemistry in schizophrenics is slightly altered than in the brains of normal people. Post-mortems have show that schizophrenics show abnormally high levels of a nuro chemical called Dopamine. Research has shown that when drugs that block dopamine are given to a schizophrenic their symptoms seem to reduce. Also research has shown the when a drug called L-dopa, which increases dopamine in the brain is given it can produce the many similar symptoms that’s schizophrenics display.
The Strengths of this explanation is that drugs that interfere with dopamine levels can actually reduce schizophrenic’s symptoms. Also that when the drug L-dopa is given to the patient the symptoms seen to reappear. The weaknesses of this explanation is that drugs which do not interfere with dopamine levels such as Clozapine are more effective in controlling the symptoms which schizophrenics suffer from. Another weakness of reducing dopamine is that it only affects the positive symptoms and not the negative. Finally we can not prove whether the dopamine level is caused by schizophrenia or if schizophrenia is caused by the dopamine levels.
Schizophrenia is a very complicated illness with various characteristics; therefore it is very unlikely to be just one explanation. At the moment the best explanation is Vulnerability because they carry a gene, but they will only develop the illness if a certain trigger occurs.
