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Schizophrenia, a disease of the brain, is one of the most disabling and emotionally devastating illnesses known to man. It has been misunderstood for a long time and has received relatively little attention. Schizophrenia is not a split personality, but a very rare and different disorder. It has an estimated one percent to one and a half percent of the U. S. population is being diagnosed with it over the course of their lives.
Schizophrenia has a biological basis and is not caused by bad parenting or personal weakness. There is no known cure for schizophrenia, but it is slowly yielding to new treatments and understandings. Most of those afflicted by schizophrenia respond to drug therapy, and many are able to lead productive and fulfilling lives. While schizophrenia can affect anyone at any point in life, it is somewhat more common in those who are genetically predisposed to the disease. The first psychotic episode generally occurs in late adolescence or early adulthood. It is uncommon after the age of 30 and rare after 40.
Schizophrenia affects more men in the 16 - 25 year old age group but the incidence is higher in women in the 25 - 30 year old age group. The probability of developing schizophrenia as the offspring of two parents, neither of who has the disease, is 1 percent. However probability of developing schizophrenia as the offspring of one parent with the disease is approximately 13 percent. Developing schizophrenia as the offspring of both parents with the disease is approximately 35 percent. Schizophrenia is characterized by a constellation of distinctive and predictable symptoms. These symptoms are most commonly associated with the disease, which denote the presence of abnormal behavior.
This includes thought disorder, delusions, and hallucinations. Thought disorder is the inability to think clearly and logically. The speech may be difficult to follow, jumping from one subject to another with no logical connection. Thoughts and speech may also be so jumbled that the person may think someone is interfering with their mind. Delusions are common among individuals with schizophrenia. An affected person may believe that he is being conspired against.
Individuals with schizophrenia believe that others can hear their thoughts. They may describe plots against them or having special powers and gifts. Sometimes they may withdraw from or hide to avoid imagined persecution. Hallucinations can be heard, seen, or felt. Most of the time they take the form of voices heard only by the afflicted person. Such voices may describe the persons actions, warn him of danger or tell him what to do.
At times the individual may hear several voices carrying on a conversation. Other less common experiences can include seeing, feeling, tasting or smelling things which to the person are real but are not actually there. Aside from the positive symptoms are the deficits or negative symptoms, which are as equally serious that represent the absence of normal behavior. This includes loss of drive, blunted emotions, social withdrawal and lack of insight. Loss of drive is often when the ability to engage in everyday activities such as washing and cooking is lost. The lack of drive and motivation is part of the illness and is not laziness.
Blunted Emotions is when the ability to express emotions is greatly reduced and is often accompanied by a lack of response or an inappropriate response to external events such as happy or sad occasions. Social Withdrawal may be caused by the fear that someone is going to harm them, and the fear of interacting with others, which may be caused by a lack of social skills. Some experiences such as delusions and hallucinations are so real, it is common for people with schizophrenia to deny they are ill, and therefore to refuse to accept treatment which is essential for their well being which causes them to have a lack of insight. The most effective treatment for schizophrenia involves medication, treatment and rehabilitation in the community. The use of anti-psychotic drugs has revolutionized the treatment of schizophrenia. Anti-psychotic medications were first introduced by two French researchers in 1952.
Prior to that time there were no effective treatments for schizophrenia. Recently people suffering from schizophrenia have a range of new therapies developed in recent years. One is clozapine, the first breakthrough drug for schizophrenia in over four decades, released in 1990. Clozapine is able to help many patients for whom all else has failed. Clozapine, unfortunately, has potentially serious side effects of its own, including dizziness, seizures, drowsiness, drooling, lowered blood pressure, and weight gain (more than half of patients become 20 % or more overweight). The greatest danger is agranulocytosis, a loss of the bone marrows capacity to make white blood cells that occurs in about 1 % of patients.
Clozapine is costly because of the necessary periodic blood monitoring, but research shows that it saves money in the long run because patients taking it are less likely to relapse and require hospitalization. It is found to control the most serious Positive Symptoms of schizophrenia. Anti-psychotic medications are often called major tranquilizers, but they do vary on the degree to which the client feels sedated. These drugs are not addictive but work by correcting the chemical imbalance associated with the illness. Some people will need to stay on treatment indefinitely to prevent a relapse.
Therefore, anti-psychotic drugs are a lifeline for a person with schizophrenia. Although anti-psychotic medications are effective in controlling psychotic symptoms for people with schizophrenia they have a number of very serious side effects that can be both uncomfortable and even dangerous. Side effects need to be monitored and managed effectively. Many consumers will discontinue their medication in order to avoid the side effects, and this can result in exacerbation of their symptoms and often re hospitalization. The most common side effects are Tardive Dyskinesia, Antichholinergic and Extra pyramidal. Tardivee dyskinesia, which is an abnormal involuntary movement, often of the mouth and tongue, can become permanent.
Anticholinergic effects include dry mouth, tachycardia, blurry vision, and constipation. An extra pyramidal effect refers to a number of disorders related to motor control, including: stiffness, shuffling, tremors, twisting and contractions of muscle groups and motor restlessness. Others may include akathisia (restless legs, fidgetiness, and agitation), parkinsonism (tremors, shuffling gait, and stiff posture). Most of the new drugs rarely cause the disorders of body movement that are uncomfortable and sometimes disabling side effects of older anti-psychotic drugs such as neuroleptic's. About half of schizophrenic patients quit taking prescribed drugs each year, and up to three quarters may stop by the end of two years often, because of the movement disorders. Other drugs like Akathisia and parkinsonism may result from blockage of D 2 receptors in the extra pyramidal motor tract, one of the pathways controlling body movements.
Treatment with anti-cholinergic and anti-parkinson ian agents, sedatives, or beta-blockers is usually effective. Although they may produce further side effects. According to one theory, blocked receptors in the extra pyramidal pathway eventually compensate by developing a hypersensitivity to dopamine that may cause TD after several months to several years. TD is a chronic syndrome that is difficult to treat. The only alternatives can be lowering the dose and switching a different drug.
These drugs apparently have relatively little effect on body movements because they do not effectively inhibit dopamine in brain regions that control motor activity. An important advantage to fewer side effects is that patients are more likely to continue taking their medicine. Besides limiting side effects, another way to insure that schizophrenic patients take their drugs is use of the deposit form in which the drugs are administered by intramuscular injection and slowly absorbed over a period of a month. About 10 % of schizophrenic patients in the United States take anti-psychotic drugs in injectable form. The only deposit drugs now available are the standard anti-psychotic agents haloperidol (Hall) and flu phenazine (Prolixin).
Although Clozapine cannot be administered as a depot drug because of agranulocytosis, but other new drugs might prove especially useful in that form. Studies suggest that it is important for schizophrenic patients to take anti-psychotic drugs as soon as possible after developing symptoms. Patients who receive no drugs during their first psychotic episode spend more time in mental hospitals during the next three to five years. A long period of gradually intensifying symptoms may also be dangerous.
Early use of anti-psychotic drugs prevents a process analogous to temporal lobe epilepsy, in which an irritable spot in the brain becomes increasingly hypersensitive if the pathological activity is not suppressed immediately. The psychological and social rehabilitation of schizophrenic patients is just as important as studies of the brain and the search for better drug treatments. People with schizophrenia need a quiet, undemanding life, but they also need work, social activities, and friendships to prevent self-neglect and deterioration. They must develop the ability to avoid unreasonable hopes and fears.
They may need instruction and training in ways to solve everyday problems that most people handle easily. Therefore, failure to take prescribed drugs is a particularly serious problem since most patients who do not take drugs will get little benefit from any other treatment. Mental health professionals must try to encourage their cooperation by discussing the purposes and side effects of drugs and improving the atmosphere of clinics. Personal attention is also often helpful. A study found that patients were much more likely to attend a clinic regularly and take their drugs as requested if they met individually with a psychiatrist for as little as 15 minutes once a month. After a year these patients had a much lower relapse rate than a control group.
Due to these drugs, most schizophrenic patients now live outside of mental hospitals. When life makes new demands on them, social skills training is one way to help them respond to those demands. They are coached, prompted, and corrected as they rehearse scenarios and observe the behavior of therapists.
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Research essay sample on Anti Psychotic Drugs People With Schizophrenia
