Mental Disorders: A Schizophrenia Study

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Roughly 3.5 million people in the United States are diagnosed with schizophrenia. This mental disorder affects the way a person thinks, feels and behaves. Many people who have this condition look like they have lost touch with reality and this can be very disabling. Schizophrenia is not the most prevalent mental disorder, but it is one of the most recognized (NIMH, 2016).
Symptoms
The onset of schizophrenia can start somewhere between the ages of 16 and 30. However, in rare cases, it can show up during childhood. There are five key symptoms: delusions, hallucinations, disorganized thinking and speech, abnormal motor behavior, and negative symptoms (NIMH, 2016).
Delusions
Delusion is defined as a false belief that is not based on reality. There …show more content…
CommonMind Consortium
A study done by the CommonMind Consortium, a public-private data foundation has pinpointed a number of gene variants that change the expression of other genes that are schizophrenic related. This study has been the biggest of its kind yet, with the largest collection of 258 postmortem brain tissues of patients that were diagnosed schizophrenic while they were alive and 279 control brain tissues. Scientists who conducted this study determined that this mental disease is 80-90 percent heritable but do not know exactly how this happens (Asher, 2016).
Over 100 chromosomal sites can be affected all at once, but each individual site has a minute effect by itself. There were 20 sites that were discovered to potentially regulate the mutation of gene expressions. However with further research, only five of these spots were found to only alter one gene. Researchers did find that there was a broad disturbance in the translation of genes which were consistent throughout all of the schizophrenic postpartum brains. About 1,400 genes in were linked to the illness (Asher, 2016).
National Institute of Health …show more content…
But we do know the symptoms. The most common symptoms are delusions, hallucinations, and negative symptoms that are disabling and not allow the diagnosed to function normally in their daily life. Things like abnormal behavior and incompetent thinking and speech that affects the relationships that schizophrenic people are able to form (NIMH, 2016). Most times, if diagnosed, the treatment used is antipsychotic medication. These affect the levels of dopamine primarily, but can also affect other neurotransmitters. To have the most successful recovery, the patient must take an active role in their treatment (NIMH Publications, n.d.). New research is being done to fine exactly how schizophrenia is caused (Asher, 2016). Scientists looked at different genes and how they are affected by the illness. They did find that, somehow, that too much pruning of the prefrontal cortex early on in life puts a person at a higher risk of being diagnosed with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is not a new illness but yet, there is so little known about it. There have been ground breaking discoveries that are leading scientists to find out what the real cause of schizophrenia is (Carey,
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