What Is A Person With Schizophrenia Like?

Schizophrenia is a psychotic disorder that affects behavior, thinking, and personality. This leads to the person showing symptoms such as delusions, hallucinations, disorganized language and altered motor characteristics, indicating loss of contact with reality.

About 1% of the world’s population suffers from schizophrenia and, although it is a widely investigated disorder, the causes that cause it are not known with certainty. However, there is evidence that it is caused by alterations in brain development, since people with schizophrenia present structural and functional differences.

Regarding the relationship between schizophrenia and personality, since investigations usually take place once the disease appears, it is complex to determine which traits predispose, which are the result of the disorder and which are inherent to the person.

In any case, it is common that before the disease appears, the person shows schizotypal or paranoid features. That is, that you already have some strange ideas, there is some social isolation and lack of interest, school or work problems, etc.

Symptoms

It is clear that personality traits are bidirectionally related to the symptoms of schizophrenia.

Therefore, before exposing what a person with schizophrenia is like, their symptoms will be described. These can be divided into positive, negative, cognitive, and disorganized symptoms.

Positive

Positive symptoms refer to the greater presence of delusions and hallucinations. Generally, the delusions that usually appear are:

• Persecutory : the person believes that they are following, deceiving or spying on them.
• Reference : Create songs, news, announcements, etc. they are addressed to her.
• From theft or insertion of thoughts : you believe that others can read your mind, or that your thoughts can transmit them to others or be inserted by someone else.

On the other hand, hallucinations can be visual, olfactory, tactile or taste, but auditory ones are by far the most frequent. In that case, people with schizophrenia hear voices commenting on their behavior, talking to each other, or making critical comments to them.

Negative

These symptoms suppose the decrease of certain emotions or processes that in people without the disorder are at normal levels.

• Flattened affect : his facial and emotional expression is scarce, as well as eye contact.

• Poor speech : the person speaks little and gives poor responses.
• Anhedonia : there is a decrease or lack of pleasure in doing certain activities.
• Lack of sociability : shows no interest in maintaining social relationships.

Cognitive

This disorder leads to a deterioration of different cognitive processes, such as attention, processing speed, memory, abstract thinking, problem solving or understanding in social interactions. In addition, they tend to have less flexibility and learning capacity.

Disorganized

In this group are the alterations of the thought and the sample of strange conducts. Thus, people with schizophrenia tend to have a scattered speech, without a specific objective or direction, constantly changing the subject. In addition, it may be that his speech is directly incomprehensible and extravagant.

It is also common for them to have a messy, childish appearance, with inappropriate hygiene and behaviors. As for the motor aspects, it can range from catatonia, an alteration that makes you maintain a very rigid posture, to performing disorderly movements without any objective.

Personality characteristics

In relation to schizophrenia, there is also a schizotypal personality disorder, but little has been described about what the personality of a person with a schizophrenic psychotic disorder is like.

In this sense, it is important to take into account what traits are related to the disorder, how they develop throughout the disease and how they affect it.

Some studies have found that people with schizophrenia are more introverted, neurotic, and quirky than the general population. Thus, as they present lower levels of consciousness, that is, they have less self-control, organizational capacity and sense of duty.

On the other hand, schizophrenia associated with psychopathy has traditionally been studied. Although there is no evidence to say that, yes , we found in this anti – social traits more population and a higher level of psychopathic characteristics than the rest of the population.

Temperament

What differentiates the temperament from the personality is that the former is more instinctive and biological dimensions, being more determined by the nervous and endocrine systems. While the personality is the set of emotions, thoughts and behaviors that determine a pattern of behavior including a more social or experiential influence.

In this way, people with schizophrenia tend to have a temperament more characterized by a low search for novelty, greater indifference, pessimism and shyness. They are also usually more inactive, unstable and less persistent.