Massey 1

Schizophrenia (Paranoid Type)

        Today Schizophrenia is known as one of the most horrendous psychiatric mental disorders  one could possibly be diagnosed with.  Eugene Bleuler coined the term in 1908.  The name Schizophrenia comes from the Greek works ‘skhizein’ meaning ‘to split’ and ‘phren’ meaning ‘mind’, in other words, “split mind” not to be confused with multiple personality disorder.  It instead refers to the fact that the mind can no longer see the difference between what is real and the delusions that it creates because of the disorder. There are five differing types of schizophrenia.  The kind of schizophrenia called paranoid schizophrenia is arguably the most horrific of the five.  There are two kinds of schizophrenic symptoms, positive and negative symptoms.  Positive symptoms are usually seen in psychotic episodes and usually entail diverse abnormal behaviors such as delusions, hallucinations, and disordered and disorganized thoughts.  The negative symptoms are seen between psychotic episodes and generally involve the loss of normal behavior.  Negative symptoms include social reclusiveness, catatonic behavior, reduced speech and not showing emotions. Although, the main criteria of this disease are a preoccupation with out of the ordinary delusions that the patient creates in his or her mind, accompanied by frequent auditory and sometimes visual hallucinations.  There are other criteria that are not as prominent in paranoid schizophrenia but may still be seen such as catatonic behavior, which is the main characteristic of catatonic schizophrenia, disorganized speech and or behavior, also known as ‘word salad’ in which the patient will ramble on incoherently about delusional thoughts he or she has, as well as the flat affect. The flat affect, also known as the blunted affect, is the term that describes the lack of emotional reactions to certain situations, in other words it is the reduced, or the absence all together of,  emotional expressiveness.  

Join now!

        Throughout history there have been accounts of schizophrenia-like syndromes that report, irrational, uncontrolled, and incoherent behavior.  And since there is no hard historical evidence mentioning schizophrenia it is thought that it is a modern occurrence or that if it is not it was masked in historical, medical writings by being lumped in with related psychotic phenomena such as psychoses,  dementia, or melancholia. The very first detailed case report of one James Tilly Matthews in 1797 and other such accounts published by Phillipe Pinel in 1809 are considered to be the very first definite cases of schizophrenia recorded in medical journals. ...

This is a preview of the whole essay