March 05, 2005

Interview: Dr. Pat McGorry

There is a good interview with one of the leading researchers in early diagnosis and prevention of schizophrenia (and related disorders like bipolar disorder) from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Some brief quotes from the interview:

"early diagnosis … is a much more effective and cost-effective way to treat people. That’s well established in cancer, heart disease, diabetes, anywhere else. It’s been a difficult struggle to get that accepted in psychiatry, but now there there’s increasing evidence - particularly for psychotic disorders, but also for other kinds of ah potentially severe mental illnesses - that the same principle applies"

"psychosis is a broad term covering a loss of contact with reality in the normal sense, so what it really means is symptoms like delusional beliefs, hallucinations, you know, perceptual disturbances … a disorganisation of thinking and speech. And if people have got those sort of symptoms we refer to them as psychotic, and a number of disorders fall under the psychotic grouping, such as schizophrenia, psychotic affective disorders, drug related psychosis, and so on"

Read the entire interview at:

Interview - Professor McGorry

More information on Dr. McGorry and his work:

Scientists studying bold notion of preventing schizophrenia

Can We Predict and Prevent Schizophrenia?


Comments

My name is Marg Knight my son Brad is now 25yrs old he is schizophrenic, he was one of Pats patient and still keeps in contact with Pat but what I am interested in is any udate info of scz, I noticed on this website there is information on Blood testing, predicting the course of and IQ test for schizophrenia etc.
I found out only about two years ago that there are 5 family members in my family with bi-polar/schizophrenia
so I am really interested in blood testing to see how far can these genes be carried on. eg grandchildren does the percentage become lower per generation or stays the same with the carrier.
Thanking you for any information that you could send me.
Marg Knight.

Posted by: Marg Knight at June 8, 2005 11:02 AM

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