My life's Adventure

I read about positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia today.

Reading about schizophrenia keeps me well.

I read about the difference between chronic and acute schizophrenia and the misuse of these labels. I read that perhaps using the terms type 1 and type 2 is a better typology. Type 1 is where positive symptoms dominate and type 2 is where negative symptoms dominate instead of associating the label acute schizophrenia with positive symptoms and the label chronic schizophrenia with negative symptoms. This was in chapter 2 of this book,

Howe, Gwen. Working With Schizophrenia: A Needs Based Approach (London, U.K. Jessica Kingsley, 1995).

This chapter describes positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia. Positive symptoms are symptoms added to the normal personality and negative symptoms meaning symptoms that take away from the normal personality. Normal here can simply mean what one was like before one's episode.

The three basic types of positive symptoms are

Altered Perceptions

This is where hearing voices fits in and seeing things and also the distorted perceptions like weird faces and smells and tastes that are may be over sensitive to certain characteristics of the environment.

Delusional Ideas

This is where people feel they are being watched or are at the centre of attention. This can also be constructed with ideas of reference. In my own experience this happens when one is tired after an abnormally long day. Thus this symptom could be connected with either stress or physical health. This symptom can also results in sexual confusion or lack of clearly defined sexual boundaries. Also here perceptions of illness and health can be distorted.

Abnormal Thought Structure

This is a symptom where ones thoughts jump all around or some detail like a license plate on a car in front can be meaningful when, in fact, there is really no real meaning to it. This can also result in having one's attention taken by an object where one appears to be staring into empty space or at a table or object on a table. This would be greater I believe if one was high on marijuana. This is also the symptom where the ideas of intrusive thoughts can effect someone. Also beliefs that one is a very bad person can effect someone with these symptoms when the person is actually not a bad person or has no intention of acting on these thoughts. This can be quite distressful and cause an anxiety in my experience.

Negative symptoms can be more debilitating. The negative symptoms tend to be around lack on enjoyment of life or amotivation. This lethargy can be also confused with withdrawal and lethargy of marijuana smoking.