By: Amit Kothiyal
Submitted: 2009-11-18 23:04:41 | Word Count: 595
Schizophrenia is a chronic, relentless, and disabling brain disease. In fact, it can be defined as a disorder characterized by a range of cognitive and emotional dysfunctions that basically involves instability in the content of thought, perceptions, language and communication skills along with fluency of thought and speech and interpersonal functioning. More often, it affects an individual's capacity to "think straight." Thoughts may come and then may go easily and rapidly and an individual may not be able to focus on one thought for very long and may be easily distracted.
Individuals who have schizophrenia often suffer or carry terrifying symptoms of hallucination and delusion. Generally, considered as psychotic symptoms, in hallucination a person has a tendency of watching, listening, smelling, or feeling something that doesn't really exist. Moreover, he or she may also have a false sense of sound like listening different tones or voices that might not be heard by other individuals. These are the most ordinary psychotic symptoms that generally affects near about 65 to 70% of patients. Adding to this, delusion is the false psychological belief and a person usually has a thought that other people are reading their minds or controlling their thoughts. These symptoms may leave them fearful. In most of the cases, their speech and behavior get so disorganized that they may be impenetrable or terrifying to others.
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Apart from this person suffering from schizophrenia may experience severe mental symptoms or even psychosis due to undetected essential medical conditions. A patient may not be capable of sorting out what is appropriate or irrelevant to a situation. The person may be unable to connect thoughts into coherent sequences, with thoughts becoming disorganized and fragmented. Moreover, a person may show any interest in social gatherings, avoid contact with others and when enforced to cooperate, he or she may have not had anything to say. In some severe situations, an individual can spend an almost entire day doing nothing at all. These problems with disturbing expression can be particularly upsetting to friends or even family members. The consequences of the disease, in any case, are very much emotional and as a result, psychological therapies can be helpful and one of the best ways to treat this disease.
In recent times, the use of cognitive-behavioral therapy, which is primarily considered as psychotherapy has shown positive improvement in both positive and negative symptoms in some patients. The approach has strengthened the patient's capacity for normal thinking, using mental exercises and self-observation. Actually, some evidence has even shown drastic improvement in patients' ability to learn and remember different things. Adding to this, individual psychotherapy is another form of psychosocial therapy that is available for people with schizophrenia. This type of therapy mainly focuses on current or past problems, thoughts, experiences, feelings and relationships.
In this therapy, a sufferer shares his or her experiences with a trained empathic person. Now talking about their world with someone outside it can help the patient gradually learn and understand more about themselves and their problems. This psychotherapy helps them learn to sort out between the real and unreal or distorted world. Recent studies also indicate that supportive, reality-oriented, individual psychotherapy can be beneficial for outpatients with schizophrenia.
Psychotherapy for schizophrenia often emphasizes adding structure to a person's life. This structure can assist the patient suffering from schizophrenia in going to work every day, keeping good personal hygiene, and building personal relationships.
