Free Essays,College Free Essays,Free College Essays at Anti Essays

Schizophrenia is categorized as a “group of psychotic disorders involving major disturbances in perception, language, thought, emotion, and behavior”. There are four types of Schizophrenia: paranoid, catatonic, disorganized, and undifferentiated. Each of these types either has what is known as positive symptoms, or negative symptoms. Positive symptoms are exaggerations of normal behavior, hallucinations, or delusions. Negative symptoms are the losing of normal thought processing, impaired attention, limited speech, few emotions, and social withdrawal.
There are many theories about what causes Schizophrenia. These theories are broken up into groups of biological theories and psychological theories. The biological theories include: Genetics, Neurotransmitters, and brain abnormalities. Some scientists believe that the genes that are passed down through families play a considerably large role in developing schizophrenia. They have also been able to pinpoint the exact genes that relate to schizophrenic disorder and even the exact chromosome location of some of them. Heritability has been studied extensively and scientists have found that forty-eight percent of identical twins show signs of schizophrenic disorders. The risk of schizophrenia increases with genetic similarity. If one of those two twins develops schizophrenia, the other twin has a forty-eight to eighty-three percent chance of developing it himself.
Another Biological theory is the theory of neurotransmitters. The most well known cause of schizophrenia by neurotransmitters is a dopamine imbalance. The
over activity of dopamine neurons causes schizophrenia. Large doses of amphetamines increase dopamine in the brain; the excess dopamine causes many of the positive symptoms of schizophrenia (hallucinations, delusions of grandeur).
The last of the Biological theories is the brain abnormalities theory. People with schizophrenia have larger cerebral ventricles than the average...