a. Positive Symptoms
Positive symptoms generally include the more active manifestations of abnormal behavior or an excess or distortion of normal behavior; these include
delusions and hallucinations.
i. Delusions
A belief that would be seen by most members of a society as a
misrepresentation of reality is called a disorder of thought content, or a delusion.
Because of its importance in schizophrenia, delusion has been called “the basic characteristic of madness”. If, for example, you believe that squirrels are aliens
sent to Earth on a reconnaissance mission, you would be considered delusional. The media often portray people with schizophrenia as believing they are famous
or important people such as Napoleon or Jesus Christ. Arthur‟s belief that he could end starvation for all of the world‟s children is also a delusion of grandeur.
A common delusion in people with schizophrenia is that others are “out to get them.” Called delusions of persecution, these beliefs can be most disturbing.
One of us worked with a world-class cyclist who was on her way to making the Olympic team. Tragically, however, she developed a belief that other competitors
were determined to sabotage her efforts, which forced her to stop riding for years. She believed opponents would spray her bicycle with chemicals that would take
her strength away, and they would slow her down by putting small pebbles in the road that only she would ride over. These thoughts created a great deal of anxiety,
and she refused even to go near her bicycle for some time. PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI
Other more unusual delusions include Capgras syndrome, in which the person believes someone they know has been replaced by a double, and
Cotard’s syndrome, in which the person believes a part of his or her body e.g., the brain
has changed in some impossible way.
ii. Hallucinations
The experience of sensory events without input from the surrounding environment is called hallucination. Hallucinations can involve any of the senses,
although hearing things that are not there, or auditory hallucination, is the most common form experienced by people with schizophrenia. This behavior is
consistent with research, which suggests that people tend to experience hallucinations more frequently when they are unoccupied or restricted from
sensory input. Exciting research on hallucinations uses sophisticated brain-imaging
techniques to try to localize these phenomena in the brain. Using single photon emission computed tomography SPECT to study the cerebral blood flow of men
with schizophrenia who also had auditory hallucinations, researchers in London made a surprising discovery.
These observations support a theory that people who are hallucinating are not hearing the voices of others but are listening to their own
thoughts or their own voices and cannot recognize the difference. They may have deficits in speech processing that result in these distortions
According to Beck and his colleagues, factors that distinguish delusions from hallucinations is how much the person
‟s moment-to-moment stream of consciousness is controlled by the belief, how sure the patient is that the belief is
true, how important the belief is in the patient ‟s meaning system, and how
impervious the belief is to logic, reason, and counterevidence. Hallucinations are more to the perceptual experiences in the absence of external simulation, such as
any sensory modality. In other words, delusions are more something that is not true controlled by a person‟s belief and hallucinations are more to the sensory
perception such as seeing or hearing. A schizophrenic sees or hears something that is not true.
b. Negative Symptoms
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