Analyzing Psychological Disorders

Analyzing Psychological 6

Analyzing Psychological Disorders

Rick Rone

Axia College of University of Phoenix

Analyzing Psychological 6

Schizophrenia is a psychological disorder or mental illness that involves many kinds of behaviors and thoughts, like auditory hallucinations and extremely disturbed mood swings. This psychological disorder, at some point in the illness, also involves a psychotic phase with delusions, and grossly bizarre and disorganized speech and behavior. People with this disorder believe that their hallucinations are real, while the rest of the world is completely bizarre. The progression of Schizophrenia is not the same for everyone. Some people will experience only one psychotic episode and go on to live an otherwise perfectly normal life, while others never function independently and always struggle with hallucinations and delusions. Unfortunately, many people who have this psychological disorder have lost touch with reality and can not distinguish what is reality and what is fantasy.

Researchers are not exactly certain what causes Schizophrenia and no laboratory test has been found to be diagnostic of this disorder. However, individuals with Schizophrenia often have a number of neurological abnormalities. They usually have enlargement of the lateral ventricles, decreased brain tissue, decreased volume of the temporal lobe and thalamus, a large cavum septum pellucidi, and hypofrontality, which is a decreased blood flow and metabolic functioning of the frontal lobes. They also have a number of cognitive deficits on psychological testing, like poor attention, poor memory, difficulty in changing response set, impairment in sensory gating, abnormal smooth pursuit and saccadic eye movements, slowed reaction time, alterations in brain laterality, and abnormalities in evoked potential electrocephalograms....