Schizophrenia Symptoms - What are the symptoms of Schizophrenia?

Schizophrenia affects the person in so many levels the way he thinks, behave or see the world, and even get him or her to lose touch with reality and live under a cloud of delusions and hallucinations which usually leads him or her to withdraw the social life and live in isolation.

What are the symptoms of Schizophrenia?

Schizophrenia symptoms are categorized in three categories: positive symptoms, cognitive symptoms and negative symptoms. So let's take a look at each type of these symptoms:

Positive symptoms :

positive symptoms refer to the obvious signs that only people with schizophrenia have, that's the reason why they are called positive because it's easier to be diagnosed based on these signs and get treated properly, so here is a list of the positive symptoms:

• Delusions: delusions are false beliefs that are far from reality and that the patient refuses to believe otherwise even with a given proof. here is some examples of this psychotic disorder: the sufferer thinks that people want to harm, torture or even kill him or he may believe that someone is reading his mind and manipulating his thoughts or he may believe he is fugitive from a prison and that everybody is looking for him or he may believe he is god...
• hallucinations: unreal information or sensations perceived by the patient such as seeing things that don't exist and hearing voices that only the sufferer could hear or smelling odors or feeling like being touched by someone... the dangerous thing about hallucinations is that the voices heard by the patient may give him orders to harm himself or do something very bad that's why these signs should not be ignored.
• Disorganized symptoms: they are positive but not good at all; they affect the ability of how the person thinks, reacts and speaks. the patient have difficulties saying clear sentences that make sense or communicate with other people, the patient thoughts are disorganized and distorted and a simple decision is so hard to be made, also the patient may engage himself into writing pages and pages with no meaning at all, he may also forget or lose things easily or repeat acts or movements.
• Catatonia: a long period of immobility in which the person may spend hours being fixed in a single posture or position.

Negative symptoms :

The word negative means that the illness is hardly diagnosed because the obvious signs of schizophrenia are absent and the patient may get diagnosed with depression or bipolar disorders because of the similarity of the symptoms between them, here is a list of the negative symptoms:

• Lack of motivation and the loss of interest in life and activities.
• Low energy levels.
• Social withdrawal and reduced speech.
• Lack of emotions.
• Poor hygiene and the loss of pleasure.

Cognitive symptoms :

These symptoms are not clear enough to be categorized under the positive symptoms; however, they lead a specialist to diagnose correctly a person with schizophrenia unlike the negative symptoms, so let's take a look at those symptoms:

• The sufferer is unable to understand the information or use it to make a decision.
• The patient can hardly or cannot pay attention and he is having trouble focusing.
• The patient is having trouble with his memory and he is unable to use the information he has just learned.

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