Over the last century, schizophrenia has emerged from being a mental illness that eluded the understanding of physicians to a disease at the forefront of neuroscience research.
Often setting in at the brink of adulthood, transforming a perfectly "normal" person into someone else, schizophrenia was frequently mistaken as a form of madness or a manifestation of evil.
Some schizophrenia symptoms include impairment of cognitive abilities, split personality, and drastic mood changes, as well as paranoia and extreme depression. Most schizophrenic patients claim to hear voices or suffer delusions and respond to them as they would to a real situation.
The psychological diagnosis of schizophrenia shows patients suffering from signs of attention deficit, weak memory, difficulty in adapting responses, and abnormal eye movements.
Schizophrenic treatment is a combination of counseling and schizophrenia drugs. Schizophrenia drugs are a lifelong commitment; at best, they control the outbursts of psychosis. Antipsychotic schizophrenia drugs have been used since the 1950s to curtail psychosis and to deter relapses. Some of these were fluphenazine, haloperidol, and chlorpromazine, but were notorious for their degenerative side effects.
Since the 1990s, many newer generation schizophrenia drugs have become popular, since they don't have many of the side effects of the older generation of drugs. The top five schizophrenia drugs of this category are:
1. Aripiprazole
2. Clozapine
3. Olanzapine
4. Quetiapine
5. Risperidone
Even with the availability of such effective drugs, the first step in the treatment of schizophrenia is to have patients accept their illness and eliminate triggers that promote psychosis. A bigger aspect of the treatment is social inclusion — providing a normal familial environment where the schizophrenic patient does not feel isolated.
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