Schizophrenia: Introduction (Nursing)

00:00 Schizophrenia spectrum thought disorders, it reflects a serious lack of organized thoughts and insights. The person is just not able to get their thoughts to be coherent. There is a strong association with neurocognitive disorders as well as genetics. And, the differentiation is often associated with the duration of the symptoms that the person is experiencing.

00:30 So let's talk a little bit about the definition. Schizophrenia disorders are chronic brain disorders. They are illnesses that affect thinking, language, behavior, relationships, emotions.

00:46 Schizophrenia literally means fragmented mind. Schizophrenia syndromes are thought disorders. It's important to know that they are heterogenous and they come with a number of different symptoms like disorganized thoughts, hallucinations, delusions, and an impairment in the psychosocial functioning. The delusion is a thought that you believe is real despite the fact that you're given evidence to the contrary. Whereas hallucinations are coming from either your sense of smell, your vision, your auditory system. It is more of a sensory misperception. The prevalence of schizophrenia is 0.6 to 1% of the general population. Males get the diagnosis of schizophrenia more often and earlier than women.

01:49 We usually see that young men starts showing the first signs and symptoms of schizophrenia in their teenage years whereas with the females when we see their diagnosis coming in, we see it between 25 and 35. And it's really an interesting differentiation because if you think about a person going through all their body changes in a normal adolescence at 15 to start having some of the symptoms that we're going to discuss happening to a young boy, how likely is that young boy to tell people that this is what he is experiencing. It is really frightening for the adolescent to have these kind of symptoms and so they start to withdraw, which you'll notice a little bit later that this is one of the negative symptoms that we see.