Dangerous Mind - Psychology Essay examples -- essays research papers

Since Ive chosen to major in psychology, Ive chosen to do my paper on something that mends to my major. In this case the mental swage schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a severly disabilitating unsoundness that has stricken the lives of al or so two one thousand thousand people in the United States alone (Keefe 20). Since this disease is so annihilating the majority of people that suffer from it either live on the streets or in mental institutions. In point, forty percent of the beds in American mental hospitals argon occupied by patients with schizophrenia (Hamilton 145). According to Hamilton the overall chances of a psyche to develop the disease is one in a hundred (145). There atomic number 18 three distinct types of schizophrenia that are diagnosed in todays society. These are disorganized, catatonic, and paranoid schizophrenia.disorganized schizophrenia can start to maneuver signs in early adolescents. These people portray inappropriate behaviors and emotions. For inst ance they whitethorn laugh at something the likes of a close friend dieing or cry on a funny part of a movie. Disorganized schizophrenics also talk in a nonsensical manner. They make up their own language or just talk backwards. Catatonic schizophrenia is set apart from the others because of the persons with it unique catatonic, or motionless, state. These people spend lomg periods of term weeks, months, and occasionally years motionless or in other row "dead to the world" (Hamilton 120). When they do snaqp out of their catatomic state they are extremly opposing and aggressive. Last is paranoid schizophrenia which is characterized by the false beliefs or delusions the person has. For example the thought that the FBI planted a secret microchip in their brain and is controlling them. Alomg with these specific types of schizophrenia are some symptoms that pertain to all schizophrenics.Firstoff, all people diagnosed with schizophrenia have perceptual difficulties, that is, th ey sufer from hallucinations. A hallucination is a false sensory experience, such as eyesight things, hearing things, and scour feeling things that arent really there. Hallucinatioms have a have sense of reality to the persons who suffer from them. Auditory hallucinationsare by far the most common form of hallucinatiom in schizophrenia. They are so characteristic of the disease that a person with true auditory hallucinations should be assumed to h... ...f the difficulty and therfore were removed. Instead of helping the schizophrenic, though, it just took what shreds of personality they had left and left them like zombies. Times have changed and extinsive research is done on all theoretic treatments before they are administered to any real patients. The most important and ministrant treatment used today is that of drugs. Drugs used to treat schizophrenia are called antipsychotics. Keefe pointed out that antipsychotics melt off symptoms of the disease, shorten a patients stay i n the hospital, and reduce the chances of rehospitalization (145). Persons with schizophrenia, when entering psychiatric hospitals, used to stay for several weeks or even months. With these new antipsychotic drugs, though, the stay has been reduced to just days. In fact a person who takes the drugs has a 3-out-of-5 chance (60 percent) of not being rehospitalized (Keefe 164). These antipsychotics take by blocking certain receptors of certain types of neurotransmitters in the brain. For instance chlorpromazine is an atipsychotic that blocks the receptorsfor dopamine, which as I explained is believed to be the cause of most symptoms of schizophrenia (Anderson 97).