What is Schizophrenia?
Schizophrenia is a mental illness that causes you to have an altered experience of reality. It impacts your ability to think clearly, manage emotions, make decisions, relate to others, and affects your ability to learn at school.
Symptoms include hallucinations, delusions, disordered thinking, extremely disorganised or abnormal motor behaviour, and general negative symptoms. Contrary to popular belief, people suffering schizophrenia do not have a ‘split personality’.
Hallucinations can include hearing or seeing things that aren’t really there. Hearing voices is the most common hallucination.
Delusion is believing something that isn’t true even when there is contrary evidence.
Disordered thinking is when you struggle to remember things, organise your thoughts or complete tasks.
Extremely disorganised or abnormal motor behaviour can present in many ways including childlike silliness, unpredictable agitation, resistance to instructions, inappropriate or bizarre posture, a complete lack of response, or useless and excessive movement.
General negative symptoms affect your abilities to take care of yourself, relationships, education, and can be sometimes confused with clinical depression.
Onset is most often during late adolescence and the twenties, and tends to appear earlier in men than women.
Schizophrenia affects around 1 in 300 people worldwide.
What is Schizoaffective Disorder?
Schizoaffective disorder is a chronic mental health condition characterized primarily by symptoms of schizophrenia, such as hallucinations or delusions, and symptoms of a mood disorder, such as mania and depression.
How does Schizophrenia impact life?
One of the biggest challenges for people affected by schizophrenia is the stigma experienced in the community. Most people find schizophrenia hard to understand and there are many myths about the illness, including that people with schizophrenia have a ‘split personality’.
Major life impacts include talking or writing very fast, or talking much less than normal, being muddled, irrational or very hard to understand, withdrawn from normal activities, being angry, aggressing or suspicious, disordered sleep, hyperactivity or reckless behaviour, laughing or crying at inappropriate times, or being unable to laugh, cry or express happiness, lack of personal hygiene, developing depression or anxiety.
These will all impact your ability to maintain steady work, personal or romantic relationships and may cause thoughts of suicide or harming others.
What treatments are available?
Schizophrenia can’t be cured but it can be treated and managed with antipsychotic medications and psychotherapy such as cognitive behavioural therapy, assertive community treatment and supportive therapy.
Our support team can help you in your everyday life to experience a greater quality of life by ensuring you’re eating healthy, nutritious meals, attending appointments, keeping yourself and home clean and hygienic, as well as accessing the community and rebuilding interpersonal skills.
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