What are symptoms of schizophrenia?
Symptoms of schizophrenia can include false beliefs, hallucinations and chaotic thinking. In this video HealthMaker Jeffrey Lieberman, MD, explains the different types of schizophrenia symptoms and how they're used in diagnosis.
Transcript
The diagnosis is made definitively
when an individual develops what are called psychotic symptoms. So these are disturbances in thinking and perception
largely. You begin to have false beliefs or ideas. You think things are happening that aren't happening.
You-- you get strange ideas that don't have a bearing in reality. You misperceive things.
You think people are talking about you when they're not. You become very self-referential. You walk into a room, and somebody makes a gesture,
and you think it's-- they're doing it in relation to something you've done or who you are. Hallucinations, you begin to see or hear
or smell things when there's no actual environmental stimulus. So these are the cardinal signs by which the diagnosis is made.
In addition, a person's thinking often becomes kind of chaotic and disorganized, not coherent and logical.
And then there are associated symptoms that occur as well. Another group are called negative symptoms.
And whereas the psychotic symptoms tend to be thought of as like overactivity of parts of the brain that produce the hallucinations
or the aberrant thinking, the negative symptoms are deficits. So you lose your emotional tone, your emotional vibrance.
You lose the capacity to form relationships. You lose interest in things.
So these negative symptoms are very, very sort of debilitating because they really
are the part of the illness that kind of robs the person of their personality, of their soul.
mental health behavior
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