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Schizophrenia
What are the symptoms?
When someone has schizophrenia their thoughts, feelings and actions are somewhat disconnected from each other so that what they do may be out of keeping with what they say or feel. The symptoms are divided into positive and negative symptoms.
Positive symptoms include: hallucinations, that is hearing, seeing, feeling or smelling something which is not actually there; and delusions which are false and normally unusual beliefs, for example, believing that you are someone famous.
Negative symptoms affect someones interest, energy and emotional life. As a result, the person with schizophrenia may not bother to get up or go out, they may not wash and they may find it hard to talk to other people.
New ways of producing pictures of the brain shows that some people with schizophrenia have larger spaces in the brain than people who do not suffer from the illness. This suggests that parts of the brain may not have developed quite normally. The two main theories to explain this are complications during birth and a virus infection during the early months of pregnancy.
Background
| Inheritance patterns and prenatal diagnosis 
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