Schizophrenia Symptoms & Features

Question 1

Key Symptoms of Schizophrenia

Answer 1

DSM-V Requires 2/4 for Diagnosis to be made

Positive
Hallucinations

Delusions

Disordered Thinking

Thought insertion
Believing thoughts do not belong to them

Negative
Social withdrawal
Alogia (poverty of speech)
Avoilation (Lack of goal-directed behaviour / motivation)

Question 2

Features of SZ

Answer 2

Lifetime Prevalance - 0.3%-0.7%

Onset - Early 20s in Males, Late 20s in Females

Prognosis - 1/3 recover completely, 1/3 repeated episodes 1/3 untreatable. Positive symptoms less prevalent later in life, negative symptoms often remain

Question 3

Eval. of SZ Diagnosis

Answer 3

Strength
Regier (2013) found DSM 5 had kappa of 0.46 (good) & Sartorius (1995) found it to be 0.86. Only 3.8% of clinicians said they lacked confidence in their SZ Diagnosis using ICD-10

Weakness
Shares symptoms with other disorders (CO-MORBIDITY) - Hallucinations can be experienced with depression or PTSD

Culture can affect diagnosis. e.g. Rastafarians use words such as ‘overstand’ for ‘understand’ and a clinician may wrongly class this as Disordered Thinking