Symptoms And Outcomes Of Schizophrenia - 1634 Words

Schizophrenia does not exist in nature but is a man-made concept (Boghossian, 2001). It is a blurred set of ideas with no natural boundaries, constituting a social construct (Brockington, 1991). A study by Dutta et al., (2007) infers that patients diagnosed with schizophrenia present a wide diversity of symptoms and outcomes, and no biological or psychological feature has been found to be pathognomonic of the disorder. The paper goes on to say that there is no defining symptom boundary to separate it from other conditions. The biological correlation with schizophrenia may not be the cause of the disease but instead cause the social situations which promote anxiety, drug abuse, depression, and other factors that are said to cause†¦show more content†¦Kraepelin (1896) claimed that schizophrenia was biological and organic. An alternative possibility is that schizophrenia has external causes, such as social, economic and stress factors (Clare, 1976; Davey, 1996). One twin st udy, for example, found that it is not uncommon for only one twin to exhibit symptoms of schizophrenia (Gottesman, 1994). Researchers now consider the possibility that schizophrenia has both genetic and environmental causes (Leff, 1996). The perplexing complications and conflicting findings of this mental illness indicates the probability of schizophrenia being a social construct. It is possible that modern psychiatrists continue to claim that schizophrenia is genetic, despite the lack of supporting evidence, because it is more popular and with ever improving technology, more exciting and therefore more lucrative (Boyle, 2002). Advancing technology opens ways to study the functioning brain of a person with the disorder with special attention paid to genetics, neuro-imaging and neurobiology (McGlashan Johannessen, 1996). This inevitably shapes psychiatrists’ theories and studies of schizophrenia and consequently, their understanding of it. In regards to the role of relationships in the onset of schizophrenia, some psychologists theorize that family communication and behaviour has