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7. Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a complex mental illness that can be devastating if it is compared to the other brain disorders. This is in line with Veague et al. 2007:1
who state that schizophrenia belongs to a psychotic disorder disrupting thoughts, speech, and behaviours. Thus, a person with schizophrenia has disorganized in his
or her way of thinking which influences his or her behaviour. For example, someone with schizophrenia might dress inappropriately without considering the
weather condition. This person might also mumble to himself or herself. According to Andreasen 2001:195, Euglen Bleuler is the one who gives the
name of this mental disorder. He chooses this term since the features of this disorder are the inability to think clearly and link together in the process of
thought and speech. Thompson 2007:33 says that schizophrenia can affect severe condition
in an individual’s life, such as difficulty in managing money, self-injury, impaired learning or memory, and disapproval in everything he or she dislike. In this case,
the sufferer with schizophrenia will have episodes of acute psychotic symptoms, especially having the disturbances in mood, thinking, and behaviour. The
psychotic symptoms may affect the sufferer in losing contact with the reality. Thompson 2007:33 explains further that the psychotic symptoms are primarily
characterized by hallucinations, delusions, and disorganized thought patterns. These explanations are as follows.
Hallucinations means that things seen, heard, and felt are not actually received. The person with hallucination may hear voices that are not there. Even,
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he or she will do bad things based on what the voices instruct him or her to do. Meanwhile, delusions include false beliefs having misinterpretation of the reality.
For example, a schizophrenic person may believe that the government is torturing him or her when he or she is hit in a crowd accidentally. In addition, delusions
give a strong feeling like more anger and more mistrust. On the other hand, disorganized thought patterns deal with the disorganized speech and behaviour.
The sufferer will be incomprehensible in doing conversation and making cohesion between sentence and clause in his or her words.
As stated by Stefan, Travis, and Murray 2002:14, there are three types of psychotic symptoms. They are positive symptoms which consist of delusion
and hallucination, positive thought disorder including disorganization, and negative symptoms involving social withdrawal, apathy, self-neglect, and poverty
of speech. Those symptoms occur when the sufferer has an acute period. It shows that the chronic sufferer of this illness does not regain normal functioning.
Since schizophrenia’s symptoms can vary, some experts divide them into several subcategories. One of those experts is Thompson. Based on Thompson’s
theory 2007:50, there are four categories of schizophrenia. They are: 1
Paranoid Schizophrenia. This illness happens when a sufferer is in his or her psychotic episodes which involve hallucination, delusion, and paranoia. In
this case, the sufferer feels as if he or she is being watched, pursued, and even extremely scared as if other people will harm him or her.
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