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Schizophrenia is a psychosis involving disorganized thoughts and garbled speech as well as hallucinations and delusions. The cause of schizophrenia is usually genetic. People who have a parent or sibling who have schizophrenia have a ten percent higher chance of developing schizophrenia. If one person from a set of twins has schizophrenia, the other twin has a forty-five to sixty percent higher chance of developing it as well. However sixty percent of the people with schizophrenia have no family members with the disorder. It is believed that a mixture of genes and a person’s environment can cause schizophrenia. People may have the genes to develop the disorder and never develop it. Some people on the other hand may have something that triggers schizophrenia, such as stress, malnutrition in the womb, or problems during birth.
For most people schizophrenia develops in the late teens to late twenties. Usually men develop schizophrenia in the late teens to mid-twenties. Women develop it in the mid to late twenties. Schizophrenia is found equally between men and women. It is believed that about one percent of the population, or one out of every one-hundred, has schizophrenia.
There are four major symptoms that are seen in all psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia. The first is thought disorder, which causes people to have a hard time understanding the person with schizophrenia. Also many people will have hallucinations. This is when a person sees or hears something that is not really there. Thirdly people will have delusions; an example of this is that the person may think they are someone famous. Lastly, people with psychosis have trouble with emotional responses. There are also three different categories of symptoms that only pertain to people who suffer from schizophrenia. They are positive, negative, and cognitive symptoms. Positive symptoms are ones that are easy to spot. They include hallucinations, delusions, thought...