Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a particular type of psychosis, schizophrenia is perhaps one of the most debilitating of the severe mental illnesses. It is a chronic and disabling brain disorder that has affected people throughout history. About 1 percent of Americans have this mental illness (http://www.medicinenet.com/schizophrenia/article.htm). People with Schizophrenia aren’t able to make sense of hat they are saying. They can sit or stand in the same place without moving for hours. People with this illness seem normal until they try to express themselves. For a long time, schizophrenia was seen as a 'functional disorder’ with some doctors calling it a sociological phenomenon - i.e. patients with schizophrenia are normal people driven insane by the insane world (Gelder, 1989). But the efficiency of anti-psychotic drugs and recent advances in biological research has shown otherwise than the research done in the 1970s. Scientific advances in neuroscience, molecular biology, genetics and brain imaging over the years have provided credible evidence for the biological bases underlying schizophrenia.
            There have been many theories of possible causes. For instance, many years of family studies indicate that schizophrenia might be inherited and schizophrenia runs in some families. A person can inherit a tendency to develop the illness, especially if the mother or father has this disorder. The risk for inheriting schizophrenia is 10 percent in those who have an immediate family member with the illness. There is a 40 percent if the illness affect’s either parents or an identical twin. However, around 60 percent of people that have schizophrenia have no close relatives with the illness. Even with all that information scientists still do not know how many genes are involved or how the genetic predisposition is transmitted. Researchers also believe that people with schizophrenia are very sensitive to a brain chemical called dopamine, or they produce too much...