Schizophrenia Flashcards
What is classification?
Organising symptoms into categories based on which symptoms cluster together in sufferers.
What is diagnosis?
deciding whether someone has a particular mental illness using the classifications.
What is schizophrenia?
a type of psychosis - a severe mental disorder characterised by disruption of cognition and emotion so that contact with external reality and insight are impaired.
What are positive symptoms of Schizophrenia?
Experienced in addition to normal reality - hallucinations and delusions.
What are negative symptoms of schizophrenia?
represent loss of usual experience - loss of clear thinking or avolition.
What is avolition?
loss of motivation to carry out tasks and lowered activity levels.
What is co-morbidity?
The occurrence of two disorders or conditions together. This calls into question the validity of classifying them separately.
What is symptom overlap?
When two or more conditions share symptoms. This calls into question classifying the two separately.
What are the two main classification systems?
ICD-10 mostly used in Europe, and DSM-5 mostly used in the USA.
What does ICD-10 require?
Two or more negative symptoms, or one positive symptom.
What does DSM-5 require?
Two positive symptoms, one if symptom is serious.
What are hallucinations?
Unusual sensory experiences.
What are delusions?
Irrational beliefs
What is the gender bias in schizophrenia diagnosis?
Women have closer relationships and hence get more support, leading to them functioning better than men.
What is the cultural bias issue in schizophrenia diagnosis?
In other cultures, hearing voices may be seen as hearing ancestors voices. Black British people are up to nine times more likely to receive a schizophrenia diagnosis.
What is reliability?
The consistency of a measure.
What is validity?
The extent to which a test measures what it set out to measure.
What is reliability for schizophrenia?
- The inter-rater reliability across time (test-retest reliability) and cultures. It is also the stability of diagnosis over time given no change in symptoms.
- Osario et al. (2019) found inter-rater reliability of +0.97 and test-retest reliability of +0.92 for the DSM5 suggesting the diagnosis of schizophrenia is consistently applied.
What is validity for schizophrenia?
The extent to which schizophrenia is a unique syndrome with unique characteristics, signs and symptoms.
What overlaps are there between schizophrenia and bipolar?
- hallucinations
- delusions
What overlaps are there between schizophrenia, bipolar and depression.
- difficulty concentrating.
- lack of interest or pleasure.
What are the two main biological explanations of Schizophrenia?
- genetics
- neural correlate (dopamine hypothesis)
What was Gottestman’s 1991 study?
A large scale family study and found higher concordance rates in MZ twins (48%) in comparison to DZ twins (17%). This suggests there must be a genetic element to this.
What does it mean that Schizophrenia is thought to be polygenic?
It requires a number of different genes to work in combination and so different combinations can lead to the condition.