Schizophrenia represents a serious chronic mental illness and though the word is well-known to everyone it is often understood in a wrong way.

The brain of a person suffering from schizophrenia works in a completely different way than that of a normal person. People with this illness believe that they hear voices, see things that others cannot see and believe that they have some superior assignment than the rest. There are so many other various symptoms that can show unexpectedly and evoke inadequate response in a person. This also makes them behave inadequately.

To the people around the whole talk of a sick person may sound a total nonsense and in some cases only this sign helps to diagnose the condition because in all senses the patient seems all right.

The condition is hard to tolerate not only for the patients themselves as they experience hardships with caring for themselves and finding a job; a person’s friends and relatives suffer, too.

Schizophrenia is a chronic illness and though therapy assists in many ways to relieve the condition it cannot eliminate it. It is possible for many people with the disease to have almost normal and fulfilling lives. Nowadays new more effective medications are being developed and different investigations are being carried out on order to find out more precise reasons of an illness.

There are three groups into which symptoms can be divided: positive symptoms, negative symptoms, and cognitive symptoms.

Under the term positive symptoms we understand behaviour patterns not characteristic for healthy people. The symptoms can be mild and more severe and should not necessarily be permanent, but they generally tend to reappear. The progress of the illness depends on whether the patient undergoes any therapy or not.

• The first positive symptom is hallucinations. These are visions, sounds, smells, sensations that are real to a patient but can not be experienced by other people; something existing in a sick person’s head. The most common hallucination is voices. Depending on the case it can be a lonely voice or several talking to each other and a patient. A person hears them in his or her head and they seem absolutely real and can have neutral character or dangerous (i.e. ordering to kill or cause harm). Though voices are the most frequent they can be accompanied by other sensations quite strong in their manifestation.
• Delusions are one more symptom if an illness. They represent false beliefs of a person to which a sick person adheres to notwithstanding a fact that others are oblivious or do not believe. Some delusions are strange and absolutely illogical like the idea that radio waves have control over a patient’s emotions or that TV sends decoded messages. Another type of delusions is a strong belief that you are not who you are but some famous and important figure. “Delusions of persecution” when a person believes that somebody wants to kill or harass him or her, spies or follows are very frequent; the idea is often very obsessive and makes a patient extremely worried and liable to bizarre behaviour.
• Another positive symptom is thought disorder that can be described as unusual or dysfunctional ways of thinking. It may be expressed in so-called “disorganized thinking” when organization of one person’s thoughts logically represents a problem; it can also have a form of “thought blocking”. The latter means that sometimes it feels for a patient as if all his thoughts have been taken away in the process of thinking and he or she stops in the middle of the speech. People with schizophrenia frequently create new words that can be called “neologisms” but they usually have no meaning.
• At last there the disease can be recognized by movement disorders. There are two extremes: a person either enters the state of catatonia when he or she does not make any moves or does not react to the world around; or a patient may make repetitive movements all the time. The former state was frequent in earlier years when the treatment methods were not so advanced.

Another group of symptoms are called negative and is connected with emotions and behavior changes. The most important thing about this part is that if there are no other signs than these it is very hard not to confuse the illness with depression. A person with schizophrenia tend to feel lack of pleasure in life, he or she cannot concentrate on any activity let along lead it to fulfillment. “Flat effect” is a common case: a patient speaks little and monotonously and with the blank expression on the face. Patients with negative symptoms may seem lazy and inert but this state is caused by the disease and such people require help in their everyday activities (including personal hygiene).

Cognitive symptoms are sometimes even harder to recognize that negative ones. They include poor “executive functioning” when a patient experience difficulties with operating the information; concentrating attention on something also becomes a serious problem as well as remembering things right after learning them. In the majority of cases these symptoms require special tests to be detected.  Clearly expressed cognitive sins make a patient’s life quite complicated and cause a lot of emotional distress.