Schizophrenia is a devastating mental disorder that affects 1% of the world's adult population. Thought, language and communication dysfunction characterize all its symptoms, but manifest at their most extreme as positive thought disorderA formal thought disorder (FTD) is a disruption of the form or structure of thought. Formal thought disorder, also known as disorganized thinking, results in disorganized speech and is recognized as a major feature of schizophrenia and other psychoses.https://en.wikipedia.org › wiki › Thought_disorder
More serious side effects: restlessness, muscle stiffness, slurred speech, tremors of the hands or feet.
Schizophrenia in general can interfere with a person's thought patterns, contribute to the belief in non-existent entities, cause hallucinations, and create strange or unusual behavior patterns; all of these factors can contribute to speech that appears disorganized to an observer but that might make sense to a person ...
Speech deficits, notably those involved in psychomotor retardation, blunted affect, alogia and poverty of content of speech, are pronounced in a wide range of serious mental illnesses (e.g., schizophrenia, unipolar depression, bipolar disorders).
A person with schizophrenia may not respond in the way we might expect in a 'normal' conversation. Your words may be met with silence or monosyllabic answers. In some cases, the person may say that they are extremely interested in what you want to discuss, but their facial expression and tone may not reflect the same.
Results: In patients with schizophrenia, MR imaging shows a smaller total brain volume and enlarged ventricles. Specific subcortical regions are affected, with reduced hippocampal and thalamic volumes, and an increase in the volume of the globus pallidus.
Phrase repetitions were found to be more prevalent among the schizophrenic group, and especially among the TD subgroup, and indices of phrase repetition were positively correlated with dimensions of formal thought disorder.
People with schizophrenia, as well as anyone experiencing extreme anxiety, may also exhibit pressure of speech. Pressure of speech usually refers to the improperly verbalized speech which is a feature of hypomanic and manic illness.
Individuals with psychosis exhibit disorganized speech that can be off topic, drift from the original thought, or be incoherent or difficult to follow. Speech by individuals with psychosis can be vague and repetitive, as well as reduced in quantity and syntactic and lexical complexity.
Disorganized behavior can include odd behaviors like smiling or laughing for no apparent reason, or talking to yourself. It can also include movements that seem to happen for no reason, or even being stressed or annoyed without a clear cause. People with schizophrenia may have a childlike silliness about them.
Schizophrenia patients are known to experience two broad classes of communication difficulties: problems in conveying meaning to others (expressive language) and disturbances in understanding the messages of others (receptive language).
Types of Negative Symptoms
Communicative deficits: speech lacking in quantity or information. Relational deficits: lack of interest in social activities and relationships.
Neurological soft signs (NSS) comprise subtle deficits in sensory integration, motor coordination, and sequencing of complex motor acts, which are typically observed in the majority of schizophrenia patients, including chronic cases and neuroleptic-naïve first-episode patients.
A new cognitive-behavior therapeutic strategy is helping patients overcome major obstacles to their recovery, especially the negative symptoms—lack of motivation, anhedonia, and asocial behavior—that are considered to be the most intransigent and disabling for patients with schizophrenia.
In general, disorganized speech refers to communication that's difficult to understand. It can manifest mildly or severely. Disorganized speech may include: repeating words. using words together that don't form a sentence.
Tangential speech: Also known as tangentiality, this describes the phenomenon in which a person constantly digresses to random, irrelevant ideas and topics. A person might start telling a story but loads the story down with so much irrelevant detail that they never get to the point or the conclusion.
Incoherent speech is mumbled or jumbled. Incoherent means that something is difficult to understand because it's not holding together. A lot of people use incoherent to mean unintelligible, which is a perfectly fine usage. But it specifically means unintelligible due to a lack of cohesion, or sticking together.
Aphasia is a disorder that affects how you communicate. It can impact your speech, as well as the way you write and understand both spoken and written language.
There aren't any diagnostic tests for schizophrenia-spectrum conditions. But healthcare providers will likely run tests to rule out other conditions before diagnosing schizophrenia. The most likely types of tests include: Imaging tests.
Schizophrenia can usually be diagnosed if: you've experienced 1 or more of the following symptoms most of the time for a month: delusions, hallucinations, hearing voices, incoherent speech, or negative symptoms, such as a flattening of emotions.
Depression & schizophrenia can be detected by examining biomarkers.