Mental Illness

Wanda Strickland

HCA/240

April 18, 2010

Natasha Billups

Mental Illness

Schizophrenia

For over a century, neuroscience and psychiatry have been trying to comprehend this diseases of the brain, amongst them the mental disorder named schizophrenia. It has been tough to explain this erratic disease, and even more problematic to medically treat and control it. What is known about schizophrenia is that it is not a “split personality” condition as is commonly and mistakenly believed. People living with a name to this Schizophrenia, do not become other people or switch in and out of character, like something out of a Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde movie.

Sometime around 1851, a French scientist was the first to attempt to put a name to the disease, he referring to it as “cyclical madness” a name based on how the symptoms of this disease came and went in cycles, going through periods of severe attack, and then periods of rest. The actual term “schizophrenia” was coined in 1911identifying the disease.

Schizophrenia is a chronic, severe, and debilitating brain disease which effects people all over the world, and in America alone, more than 2 million people each year who live with the symptoms of the disease. Schizophrenia doesn’t discriminate among the sexes, or races this is an equal opportunity disease, it effecting both men and women, black white, etc.… with about the same amount of regularity, however, it tends to appear earlier in men, usually in their late teens or early twenties, while with women, it usually doesn’t appear until their twenties or early thirties.

People suffering from this disease are afraid to get help because of the misconceptions of the disease, here are some of the misconceptions; people with schizophrenia are violent, truth is people with...