Schizophrenia is a multifaceted concept. It contains a large number of symptoms. Depending on which particular signs are more pronounced than others, the stage and form of the disease is determined. Based on the clinical picture, doctors select an effective treatment. Despite the fact that schizophrenia is not amenable to complete cure, properly selected therapy can achieve a stable long-term remission. To establish a diagnosis, the doctor collects a clinical picture, which also includes cognitive and negative symptoms. Consider these two groups of disorders.
cognitive symptoms
This category includes all the symptoms that are involved in mental activity. It can be perception, memory, attention, concentration, and so on. The result of the violation is the disorganization of thinking. Interestingly, in schizophrenics, it is not the intellect that can be changed, but the connections between the elements of thinking. This means that it becomes difficult for the patient to perceive reality, to relate concepts to each other, to compare, to generalize.
Thinking in schizophrenia is vague, inadequacy of perception of concepts familiar to a healthy person. Patients are more inclined to analyze and pay attention to minor concepts and judgments, and they do not react to important, really significant ones. By and large, there is no reaction also because schizophrenics cannot recognize something important and unimportant due to an unstable psycho-emotional state.
The following skills are also violated:
- the ability to abstract — they conducted an experiment: the patients were given different objects and asked to group them according to common characteristics. They chose not the main similar features, but secondary ones. For example, they were offered different words and instead of collecting them by concept or area of use, they grouped them according to the number of letters or similar endings;
- the ability to catch the hidden meaning — they do not understand the joke, do not laugh at anecdotes and do not realize what a proverb is. They perceive the same phrases “measure once, and cut off seven” or “a penny cuts a ruble” in a literal sense;
- incoherence of thinking — speech is a set of words that have nothing in common with each other.
Also, patients come up with new words and introduce them into their vocabulary. Most often, such concepts are born from parts of normal, real words. Patients can also repeat what they have said after others, word for word.
Schizophrenics love to rant. They are so enthusiastically telling something, but at the same time there is no thought, the words are not connected with each other.
Negative symptoms
This category includes the lost behavioral responses of the body. They may be:
- poor speech;
- lack of will;
- loss of a sense of shame;
- inability to enjoy;
- lack of motivation to act;
- absolute alienation from relatives and friends;
- inability to show love;
- emotional coldness.
Another manifestation of the disease can be autism, when patients move away from the real world and move to exist in the inner world.
If it was found that the disease proceeds slowly, then it is to be expected that the symptoms can become much more every day. In addition, we must not forget that the disease can have serious consequences on the body, for example, on the psycho-emotional state, which, in fact, will be disturbed due to excessive activity, constant delirium, too much daily excitement, etc.