How serious personality damage will cause schizophrenia disease depends on the type of its course. In some patients, symptoms increase over the years, a person can live in a family for a long time and prolong the remission with the help of drugs. Others are completely asocial, they can neither work, nor study, nor create a family.
Allocate progressive, fur-like (development by seizures) and a mixed course of schizophrenia. In this article we will mainly talk about the progressive flow. This is a type of disease course in which changes occur slowly and continuously. Such schizophrenia occurs without remissions, the defect in thinking and behavior is rapidly growing.
Symptoms of Schizophrenia
The first symptoms occur during the maturation of the person: somewhere from 15-17 years. In men, the onset (onset) of schizophrenia occurs up to 25 years, in women - more often from 20-22 to 35 years.
Each debut appears individually. These may be different manifestations:
- outbreaks of uncontrollable, biased aggression;
- an influx of torn thoughts that terribly scare the patient himself;
- sometimes depersonalism sometimes appears softly, paroxysmally, that is, estrangement from one's own personality;
- may be a halt in thoughts or concurrency;
- loss of affection for family;
- ambivalent emotions.
Over time, the symptoms become more complicated. In the case of a continuously progressive course of the disease, these changes appear gradually, and increase almost imperceptibly. Nevertheless, the process of destruction of thinking is continuously moving forward. Only sometimes the symptoms are alleviated. Such signs gradually develop:
- motor disorders appear;
- derealization - when doubts arise about the reality of existing things;
- unreasonable and irresistible desire to commit some obscure actions;
- unexplained fears, paranoia, delusional states.
Hallucinations, as a rule, appear much later, after several affective disorders. The progressive course of the pathology may not cause suspicion among others. But many patients sharply change their habits, stop monitoring their appearance and leave the house to wander. And this is a clear sign of the presence of pathology.
Paroxysmal and progressive course of schizophrenia
In psychiatry, the following types of the course of the disease are distinguished: favorable and unfavorable, as well as progressive, mixed and paroxysmal.
By a favorable course is meant a slowly developing personality disorder. Whereas with an unfavorable type, a person becomes completely unrecognizable in 5-8 years, loses touch with reality completely.
The progressive course is characterized by the fact that the patient gradually loses touch with the outside world, but does not realize this. He has no remissions, the patient cannot understand the cause of the changes. Blurring of consciousness and emotional disorders completely "draw" it into the area of distorted perception. The progressive type of course often affects not teenagers, but people older than 30 years.
There is a sluggish progressive, medium and malignant type of course depending on how serious the symptoms are and how quickly the foundations of the personality are destroyed.
The paroxysmal course is characterized in that the patient only occasionally feels bouts. He can be hospitalized once a year, he undergoes a medical course of therapy and again continues to live and work. However, with complex forms, attacks are repeated often, more than 3 times a year, and after each attack, the psyche is rapidly deformed. This leads to disability.
Continuously progressive course
Such a type as continuous progressive schizophrenia can for a long time not make itself felt around. A person does not speak much, behaves detachedly, but none of his relatives will even think that he is sick. In fact, significant changes are taking place inside his brain. The core of the personality, as it were, is torn into two parts. The behavior is not any focus or logic. A person cannot even make a simple decision.
The brain begins to work violently and chaotically, creating strange images and sensations in the body. At first, a person is frightened of these conditions and goes away for a long walk alone, chewing the same thoughts. Students drop out of school, lock themselves in a dark room. Sometimes young people begin to get involved in some strange, frightening esoteric practices that were not previously inherent in them. Gradually some sort of mania, anxiety disorder, or voices in my head, which didn’t come from somewhere, appear. Emotionally, such a person is unstable. You can’t put pressure on him.
Features of sluggish schizophrenia
The difference between sluggish schizophrenia is that such a disease develops for years and even decades. However, neither hallucinations nor special delusional states are manifested. There are some defects in thinking, such as torn thoughts or mild depersonalization. However, significant changes are not occurring. A person learns to live with the fact that his mental flow is a little strange, recognizes this. His behavior may be somewhat autistic, and his speech is rather fanciful. But he can work at ordinary workplaces where serious responsibility is not supposed.
Many domestic psychologists equated previously low-grade schizophrenia with schizotypal disorder.
Schizophrenia test
You can distinguish a sane person from a patient thanks to a special test. The test is called the "Mask". When turning a mask, a healthy person sees an illusory "real" face on the screen, despite the fact that in reality it is curved in the opposite direction. But a schizophrenic with a continuously progressive course of schizophrenia has a different view of reality, a different perception. The fact is that the brain of a schizophrenic, like the brain of a genius, does not give in to any illusion. This is due to its high activity.
Output
So, in psychiatry, according to the type of development, a low-grade (simple or slow-moving) schizophrenia, medium-medium and malignant is distinguished. The psychiatrist can determine the type and establish the diagnosis only after prolonged observation of the patient (at least six months). If the diagnosis is confirmed, the person must constantly take drugs that affect the psyche.