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Schizophrenia is a chronic disease that is still surrounded by misconceptions. However, most people who suffer from this experience a need for intimacy and intimacy. They want to enter into relationships with other people of a partner and emotional nature. Unfortunately, however, very often both the antipsychotics used in the treatment of schizophrenia and the symptoms of this disease (both positive and negative) reduce the level of sexual satisfaction in patients.
Schizophrenia — positive and negative symptoms and their impact on sexuality
To look at the negative impact of schizophrenia symptoms on sexual functioning, it will be critical to distinguish between positive and negative symptoms of the disease. The negative sides of schizophrenia are those that take something away, have a disadvantage in nature. These include: poor vocabulary, lack of pleasure (anhedonia), apathy, lack of attention to appearance, withdrawal from social life, and impaired memory and attention. Positive symptoms are called productive, as synonyms, because they include hallucinations and delusions.
People with schizophrenia are withdrawn from social life, show an autistic approach to others and the outside world. They experience the affect very superficially, resulting in very limited participation in the sexual act. Sex is not a tension, and sexual satisfaction or orgasm may not be felt. Of course, interest and desire are necessary before the onset of sexual intercourse, which does not happen in people with reduced reactivity to stimuli.
The delusions and hallucinations that accompany schizophrenia (especially paranoid) make life difficult for a couple. Productive symptoms, often religious or sexual, are accompanied by great anxiety. A person who experiences tension and chronic stress cannot fully relax and allow himself to lose control during sex. Patients with schizophrenia avoid contact with others, are prone to shyness and often lose interest in the sexual sphere.
Abnormal sexual behavior in schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is also accompanied by dangerous sexual delusions that can lead to genital mutilation. Schizophrenia causes relatively less need for sexual activity, but is often associated with sexual activity. There is talk of disorderly and unstable sexuality in patients. Unfortunately, this may be associated with the risk of contracting sexually transmitted diseases or unwanted pregnancies.
Abnormal masturbation, that is, non-developmental masturbation, is common in schizophrenia. It is characterized by excessive frequency, although this is not an element of hypersexuality (excessive sexual desire).
The picture of schizophrenia can be ambiguous in terms of gender identity. Misconceptions are very common in which a sick person is of the opposite (alternative) sex or does not have a gender. One of the criteria for diagnosing transgender people, when the phenomenon was still being diagnosed as a gender identity disorder, was the exclusion of schizophrenia.