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schizophrenia
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Below is one of our free research papers on schizophrenia. If the term paper below is not exactly what you're looking for, you can search our essay database for other topics.
Life with schizophrenia is living with a chronic brain disabling disease. Schizophrenia is a severe psychiatric disorder with symptoms of detachment from reality, emotional instability, and withdrawal into the self. Common manifestations of the disease are auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions, disorganized speech and thinking. A person with schizophrenia may feel frightened, anxious, and confused. They may believe that others are spying on them or they sometimes hear voices telling them what to do or saying things about them. Voices that other people can’t hear and visions that others can’t see. No one knows for sure what causes schizophrenia, but many believe it may be caused by some abnormal brain chemicals, these chemicals are called neurotransmitters which influence our thought processes and emotions. There are no laboratory tests for the disease, diagnosis of schizophrenia is based solely on patient self-reporting of experiences, and of observed behavior.
More than 2 million suffer from the disease, approximately 1 in 123 people. The typical onset of schizophrenia occurs in young adulthood, although the disease may be seen at any age. It shows affects earlier in men than in women. Evidence shows that schizophrenic patients are 5 to 10 percent more likely to be born in the winter or early spring(Bradbury and Miller, 1985). Schizophrenia is not entirely caused by genetics, roughly 15% of children and siblings of patients with the disease have the ten...
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