R.D. Laing, the famous Scottish psychiatrist said “Schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair”. According to the definition given by medical-dictionary, “Schizophrenia is a psychotic disorder (or a group of disorders) marked by severely impaired thinking, emotions, and behaviors. Schizophrenic patients are typically unable to filter sensory stimuli and may have enhanced perceptions of sounds, colors, and other features of their environment.
Most schizophrenics, if untreated, gradually withdraw from interactions with other people, and lose their ability to take care of personal needs and grooming.”
Schizophrenia can be classified into five different types - disorganized schizophrenia, paranoid schizophrenia, undifferentiated schizophrenia, catatonic schizophrenia and residual schizophrenia. Paranoid schizophrenia is the most common of the five.
The symptoms for schizophrenia are classified into positive and negative symptoms. The positive symptoms are the expressive symptoms which includes different kinds of hallucination, delusion, paranoia, delayed reaction among others. Some of the symptoms for negative or inexpressive schizophrenia are flattened emotion, minimal expression of emotion, lack of enthusiasm, memory problem and disinterest.
The above infographics gives a fair idea about the disease and its various aspects.