A schizophrenic is distinguished from a healthy person by his behavior and attitude to reality. He sees everything in a different light, he has his own truth and explanation of what is happening. Emotions in schizophrenia are split, they are not stable. If a healthy person is happy and sad in specific situations, when it is appropriate, then mentally unhealthy people can begin to rejoice and immediately become angry for no reason in a moment. This greatly complicates their lives, makes them incapacitated and dangerous to society. Only with stable rehabilitation, patients manage to achieve a long-term remission, curb their emotions and return to real, familiar life.
As for individual behavior, it is also inherent in schizophrenics, as well as in mentally healthy people. With only a few highlights.
Four key distinctive individual behaviors of schizophrenics
If earlier it was assumed that a mentally unstable recipient does not have individual behavior, today this judgment has succumbed to refutation. There are four proofs for this:
- Dream. An experiment was conducted in which 35 patients with hallucinations and delusions, 25 patients with depression and paranoia, and 15 people with deficiency syndrome took part. For some time, patients were examined during sleep. It was noted that the first group sleeps in different positions and the facial expressions of the recipients are active, changeable, pronounced. The second group of people displayed melancholy and sorrow on their faces, and the third group fixed in the fetal position, they also constantly tried to pull the blanket over their heads.
- Locomotion. The study now focused on examining the patients’ gait. Artsy and constrained was characteristic of patients with deficient, canonical and negative syndromes. In people with pronounced depressive symptoms, the gait was slow, restrained, and in people with an expansive-delusional state, on the contrary, it was accelerated with sharp movements. Patients with nuclear schizophrenia also showed unusual forms of gait with long but rare steps or accompanied by head turns.
- Hygiene. This characteristic was highly distorted in people with deficient, catatonic and negative syndromes. They were careless about their appearance and body, looked untidy, were attached to their things and flatly refused to change them. The paranoid was observed washing at the same time or a different kind of rituals, which he was obliged to repeat every day.
- Comfortable behaviour. It was noted only in 20% of patients. In patients with schizophrenia and deficit syndromes, behavior was directed in the opposite direction from the «comfort zone», in catatonic forms it did not change, while in paranoids and hallucinations it moved towards the «comfort zone».
This experiment makes it possible to understand that patients with mental illness are also prone to the manifestation of individual behavior.
What else is important to know?
Schizophrenics perceive reality differently, so it is not strange that in the process of developing the disease, they begin to additionally hallucinate, delirium, various states of aggression or excessive calmness. By and large, it is impossible to control the behavior of patients, because their mood is constantly changing. The mood can change, both in a second of time, and in a minute, as well as in a day. Each patient has a disease in its own way, so doctors often prescribe certain, specific, individual methods of therapy after examinations.