Schizophrenia In Adolescents

We all know Schizophrenia to be a complex mental health disorder. And most of the times, things stop at that, with the myths and stories making up for the ignorance. The end result is, a chronic, disabling disturbance of the encephalon rendering a human into a vegetable with an increasing severity within no time. Things, however, could have been different, though.

While we can't say for sure what exactly is responsible for a person turning into a schizophrenic, we do know this much: It is a chemical imbalance that aids the development of schizophrenia. Though there still remain a number of unresolved factors like genetic makeup, behavioral causes and environmental conditions, it is generally believed that Schizophrenia is mostly inherited i.e. it is a multifactorial disorder, involving the way the genes from both parents combine.

This is the prime reason behind the different thresholds of expression in different individuals as well as the reason behind more number of males developing the disorder in childhood (between ages 8 and 12 years). However, there is no such by disparity in adolescent children. However, childhood schizophrenia is a very uncommon phenomenon and it is hard identifying the disorder in such early phases. Sudden onsets are more common in the mid- to late adolescents, especially, them with a family history of schizophrenia. They have greater chances to develop the disorder than a child from a family with no such history. The risks of an adolescent developing schizophrenia are proportional to the number of his family members affected.

Adolescence is all about changes, both physical and psychological. This is when the secondary sex characteristics show up, chiefly due to an elevation of the androgen (males) and estrogen (females) levels. All that makes a teenager undergo mood swings, experience sudden bouts of temper and the rest; so the behavioral changes - either a slow transformation or sudden onsets - due to schizophrenia mostly go unnoticed. However, a common symptom of Schizophrenia is shyness and withdrawal, accompanied by bizarre ideas and/or irrational fears. One may argue that bizarre ideas are a part of creativity, which is agreed, but clinging more to the parents instead of one's own age group is definitely a telltale sign of the future onset of grossly distorted ideas and perceptions that are far from reality. Thus, when an adolescent has trouble distinguishing between dreams and reality, confused thought patterns, detailed but out-of-the-world thoughts/ideas, paranoia and in extreme case, hallucinations (both visual and auditory) and delusions brought forth by extreme moodiness, severe anxiety, lack of emotional expression, difficulty in studying, withdrawal from the society and surrounding environment and a disorganized behavior, know these to be the symptoms of schizophrenia setting in.

The next step is definitely getting things diagnosed by a qualified psychiatrist, but you must also know a bit about psychopharmacological management; it helps coping with a schizophrenic at home or outside and also let's you gauge if the psychiatrist is taking the right approach towards curing the patient. We'll discuss it on the next issue.