Imagine how hard it would be if your version of reality did not seem to coincide with what the general public believed to be reality. Living each day with hallucinations and hearing voices inside your head that are really not there. For millions of people around the world this is a normal day. They live, or try to live, their lives in the best way possible while suffering from schizophrenia. There are jokes made but the ugly reality is far from joking.

It can devastate a person, his or her job, family and personal interactions with other people. Sometimes it can mean prolonged time in an institution. In the past this disease was not understood and as a result the individuals afflicted with schizophrenia were often locked away in an insane asylum for most of their lives. The treatment methods were barbaric and did not have a positive outcome for the patients. In this article we will cover the basics of schizophrenia and what it could mean to you as either a patient or a family/friend of someone diagnosed with this illness.

Who discovered it?

It is not so much as who discovered this mental disease as who it was that first coined it “schizophrenia.” Eugene Bleuler a Swiss psychologist worked to understand the illness and to study how and what type of symptoms affected the patient. He observed that patients with auditor and visual manifestations truly believed they were real even though they were not. Bleuler was the first person to observe that the patients did not suffer from dementia and were not always young people. Schizophrenia could affect anyone of any age though most symptoms did manifest themselves in early adulthood. He termed “schizophrenia” based on the Greek root words “schizein” which meant “to split” and “phr?n” which meant ‘mind.’

How is it treated?

Schizophrenia has to be treated for the entire course of the patient’s life. It is a mixture of medication, therapy and a good support network for when there are times of crisis and the person feels as if they are slipping into the abyss of schizophrenia. Psychotherapy is not the usual treatment method of choice by itself. It can work in combination with the right mixture of medications to help the brain levels balance themselves out.

If you have schizophrenia are you violent?

Some schizophrenics do become violent when in the midst of an auditory or visual hallucination. The most important factor is not allowing them to harm themselves or someone else if they are in the midst of a violent episode.

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