Schizophrenia

 What’s the Issue?

There seems to be a lot of misinformation about Schizophrenia out there. I recently had someone describe it to me as “split personality disorder”, where a person has one normal personality, and then another “completely messed up one”.
This is Not what Schizophrenia is. Scizophrenia is a psychological disorder caused by disruptions in perception, thought, and expression.
Why Is Knowing What Schizophrenia is Important?
Confusing Schizophrenia with DID (Dissociative Identity Disorder) is damaging to those who need to seek treatments for their disorders, or may unfairly assign stigma to them.
Who is Effected in this Confusion?
Approxamatly 24 million people world wide have schizophrenia, and only half of them recieve treatment. Treatment is usually not effective in the later stages of the disorder.
Approxamatly .1% of the world population fits the criteria for DID, or 6.9 million people worldwide. Treatment varies in effectiveness, due to previous and current life circumstances.
So What’s NOT Schizophrenia?

• Schizophrenia is NOT randomly attacking and killing people. Schizophrenics are far more likely to injure themselves than others.
• Schizophrenia is NOT a person with multiple personalities. While they may hear voices, or feel that someone is controlling their mind, thoughts, or actions, no other person, or personality, ever controls their body.

So What IS Schizophrenia?

• Schizophrenia is not the same for every Schizophrenic.
• Schizophrenics often hallucinate (hearing voices or seeing things), but not all do.
• Schizophrenics may be paranoid. They could think that they are being watched, or controlled.
• Schizophrenics may be delusionsals. They may think they are God, or a messenger of God. They may think they are a famous person reincarnated, or that they are secretly dead.
• Schizophrenics may withdraw from society, and may even become catatonic.