What are the symptoms and causes of schizophrenia?

China is a country with a high incidence of mental illness. The huge population base and the huge pressure of transformation have given rise to a large group of mentally ill people. According to statistics, 200,000 people die of mental illness in China every year. So what are the causes of mental illness? What are the symptoms?

Causes

Schizophrenia is a clinical syndrome composed of a group of symptoms. It is a multifactorial disease. Although the cause of the disease is not yet clear, it is generally recognized that the individual's psychological susceptibility and the adverse factors of the external social environment play a role in the development of the disease. Both susceptibility and external adverse factors may cause the disease through the combined effects of internal biological factors. The factors causing the disease in different patients may be more important in one aspect.

Symptoms

(1) Perceptual impairment

Schizophrenia can cause a variety of sensory disorders, the most prominent of which is hallucinations, including auditory hallucinations, visual hallucinations, olfactory hallucinations, gustatory hallucinations, and tactile hallucinations, among which auditory hallucinations are the most common.

(2) Thinking disorder

Thought disorder is the core symptom of schizophrenia, mainly including thought form disorder and thought content disorder. Thought form disorder is mainly manifested by thought associative process disorder, including thought associative activity process (quantity, speed and form), thought associative coherence and logic. Delusion is the most common and important thought content disorder. The most common delusions are persecution delusion, relationship delusion, influence delusion, jealousy delusion, grandiose delusion, non-blood delusion, etc. It is estimated that up to 80% of schizophrenia patients have persecution delusions, which can manifest as varying degrees of insecurity, such as being watched, excluded, worried about being drugged or murdered, etc. Under the influence of delusions, patients will engage in defensive or aggressive behavior. In addition, passive experience is also more prominent in some patients, affecting their thinking, emotions and behavior.

(3) Emotional disorders

Apathy and incoordination of emotional responses are the most common emotional symptoms in schizophrenia patients. In addition, incoordinating excitement, irritability, depression and anxiety are also common emotional symptoms.

(4) Will and behavior disorders

Most patients have a weakened or even absent will, which is manifested by reduced activity, isolation, passive behavior, lack of due enthusiasm and initiative, decreased interest in work and study, lack of concern for the future, and no clear plans for the future. Some patients may have some plans and intentions, but rarely implement them.

(5) Cognitive dysfunction

The incidence of cognitive deficits is high in schizophrenia patients, with about 85% of patients experiencing cognitive dysfunction, such as information processing and selective attention, working memory, short-term memory, learning, and executive functions. There is a certain correlation between cognitive deficit symptoms and other psychotic symptoms, such as more obvious cognitive deficit symptoms in patients with obvious thinking form disorders, more obvious cognitive deficit symptoms in patients with obvious negative symptoms, and cognitive deficits may be related to the occurrence of certain positive symptoms. Cognitive deficits may occur before psychotic symptoms become clear (such as the prodromal stage), or decline sharply with the onset of psychotic symptoms, or gradually decline as the course of the disease prolongs. It is preliminarily believed that chronic schizophrenia patients have more obvious cognitive deficits than first-onset schizophrenia patients.