How To Lead A Healthy Life With Schizophrenia

Last Updated on Wednesday, 7 September 2011 05:11 Written by Natural Health Team Wednesday, 7 September 2011 05:11

Health Information about How To Lead A Healthy Life With Schizophrenia

Even if you are diagnosed with schizophrenia, there are still ways to lead a normal life. The secret to living a healthy life despite of this brain or mental disorder lies in a combination of factors: finding the right treatment or interventions, developing the right attitude, and staying consistent.

The need to combat the symptoms of schizophrenia is very pressing given the average statistics of individuals diagnosed with this mental condition. According to health experts, around 2.5 million people are affected with schizophrenia. The good news is that 10 to 20 percent of that figure were able to enjoy full and successful recovery from their condition.

The results of a recent research study reveals though that those percentages can go up to 68 percent with the use of psycho-social therapy for patients of schizophrenia. There are even numerous successful personalities who excelled in their respective fields despite being previously diagnosed with schizophrenia. These personalities include author Jack Kerouac, Syd Barrett (Pink Floyd guitarist), or mathematician John Nash (also a recipient of Nobel prize).

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One method to achieving a successful treatment against schizophrenia is to identify the common problems or obstacles that prevent you from enjoying success with your treatment.

The most common reason why medications or treatments prove ineffective is the fact that they focus solely on addressing positive symptoms. After all, there are two categories of symptoms for schizophrenia – positive and negative. Experts suggest that a given medication or treatment focus on addressing both type of symptoms for effective results. Another common obstacle to schizophrenia treatment is the possibility of developing side effects, especially with drugs or medications recommended for this condition. It is therefore not enough to rely solely on medications for treatment but recovery can only happen with therapy and other treatment procedures. To lead a healthy life following diagnosis of schizophrenia, it is important to find a treatment that also addresses the negative symptoms of this mental disorder.

If you lack motivation to overcome symptoms of schizophrenia, it is important to consider the remarkable recovery that other patients have enjoyed. The need to find the best intervention approaches is vital with statistics indicating that 1 out of 10 males diagnosed with schizophrenia commit suicide.

But if it offered any relief, a study conducted by Courtenay M. Harding done in 1955 to 1965 shown a large group of individuals diagnosed with this mental disorder have managed to enjoy full recovery. In fact, most of them have shown no signs of the symptoms soon after treatment and managed to carve out a healthy life of their own. This should therefore give inspiration and show patients that there is hope for this condition.

If you want to live thriving lives despite of schizophrenia, here are some pointers you need to keep in mind:

• You need to come up with a goal to help keep you motivated.

• You need to make choices on what will help move you forward in your treatment efforts.

• You need to proactively choose the right interventions that will improve your situation.

• You need to work on rehabilitation and self-sufficiency.

• You need to be consistent in your use of treatment approach and medications to see immediate results.

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How Can Schizophrenia Affect the Mental Health of a Person?

Last Updated on Sunday, 4 September 2011 10:20 Written by Natural Health Team Sunday, 4 September 2011 10:20

Health Information about How Can Schizophrenia Affect the Mental Health of a Person?

Everyone responds differently to these anti-psychotic drugs and hence sometimes, several drugs and variations have to be tried to finally get the right one. Excessive production or modest production neurotransmitter, may account for the series of mental health issues, including schizophrenia.

How is Schizophrenia treated?

Medication: While putting the patients on medication greatly reduces the symptoms of Schizophrenia and to a huge extents helps restore their lives to normal, but these drugs do not completely cure them.

What are the symptoms of Schizophrenia?

Psychotic symptoms and mental health problems usually arise in men in their late teens or at the beginning of their 20′s.The most prominent signs in youngsters can be related to their lack of sleep, fall in grades or even changing of friends.

Psychotherapy: Counseling and therapy help the patients undergoing mental health problems to understand their disorder in a better manner. Some of the most commonly used drugs include chlorpromazine, haloperidol, perphenazine, and fluphenazine.

An individual with schizophrenic relatives is ten times more susceptible to develop schizophrenia as somebody who has no history of the disorder in the family.

Heredity: Investigations show that this state tends to run in families. This will prevent the patient to cause harm, either to themselves or to others. People suffering from Schizophrenia become fearful and withdrawn because they may hear voices of people (who might not even exist), or they may believe that people are plotting against them etc.

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Viral Infection:

Some scientists believe that schizophrenia is caused by a virus which attacks the brain. Mental Health – Symptoms and Treatment of Schizophrenia is a psychotic disorder which causes a person suffering from it to lose touch with reality.

When do people get Schizophrenia?

Neurotransmitters produce chemicals that transport electrical messages between nerve cells. This disorder causes imbalance of mental health in the patient, resulting in emotional instability and violent behavior.

Severe Symptoms: Correspond to a loss or a decline in the capability to commence with plans, speak, put across emotion, or find joy in everyday life.

Extreme Symptoms:

Refer to problems with attention, memory problems, and the executive functions that permit us to plan and organize. Hospitalization: In the initial stages, where the patient’s mental health is delicate, it’s essential to hospitalize them. Extreme symptoms can also be difficult to identify as part of the disorder but are the most disabling in terms of leading a regular life.

Damage to this particular part of the brain may result in the person becoming delusional. These symptoms are noticeable in women during their mid 20′s or early 30′s.This virus is thought to assail the part of the brain that translates messages from the senses.

What are the likely causes of Schizophrenia?

Patients may be kept under watch until their treatment begins. The symptoms of this mental health disorder are classified into 3 categories:

Mild symptoms:

Mild Symptoms are mostly deal with abnormal thoughts or perceptions, including contemplation disorder, hallucinations and disorders of movement. Schizophrenia rarely occurs after 45 years of age or before the onset of puberty.

Chemical Imbalance: Schizophrenia is caused by a disparity of neurotransmitters in the brain. These thoughts make it difficult for these patients to trust anyone and in turn to have any relationships with others. People suffering from Schizophrenia have to cooperate and work with their doctors in order to find the right medication and dosage with minimum side effects to suit their needs.

Using therapy patients can be made to cope with their daily routines, interacting with people etc. Family support is also helps to a great extent for the recovery and healing of the patient. Since the causes of Schizophrenia are not very clear and the level to which they affect an individual may vary, treatment procedures are decided based on the patient’s condition. These symptoms are difficult to identify as part of the disorder and can be mistaken for lethargy or depression.

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Nine Recommendations to Increase Continuity of Mental Health Care for Schizophrenia Patients

Last Updated on Sunday, 28 August 2011 01:21 Written by Natural Health Team Sunday, 28 August 2011 01:21

Health Information about Nine Recommendations to Increase Continuity of Mental Health Care for Schizophrenia Patients

Continuity of therapy is a vital component of quality care for people with serious mental illnesses and must be given more attention by consumers themselves, family members, advocates, providers, administrators, and researchers alike. At the moment, there is an important opportunity to develop a national consensus statement on the principles and practice standards that should form the basis of a continuum of therapy designed to provide realistic assurance that consumers can access vital medications when and where they are needed. Important strides have been made in identifying the specific factors which promote continuity of therapy – it is time to seize this important opportunity as yet another stepping stone to achieving the transformation of America’s mental health care system for the benefit of consumers and their families, our communities, and our Nation. A roundtable of mental health experts has developed a set of nine recommendations for enhancing continuity of medication therapy for persons with schizophrenia or serious mental illness, including schizophrenia. They are as follows:

Encourage collaborations between hospitals and community-based organizations. Use fiscal incentives to foster collaborations including the standardization of information and shared electronic health records.

Use a quality improvement approach to enhance continuity of therapy by benchmarking at the organizational level performance and outcomes standards regarding continuity of care.

Ensure all consumers have a level of care management for the transition from inpatient to community. Care management services should be reimbursable by all payers and the disincentives to providing it should be removed.

Hospitals and community providers should focus on the “Pull Model” of transition from inpatient to outpatient care. The Pull Model focuses on involving community-based providers in the transition planning process from the beginning. Provider organizations should focus on staff competency in engagement and strategies and motivational interviewing.

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Accreditation standards should be aligned to address and improve continuity of therapy in treating serious mental illness. This may include developing standards to ensure evidence of an active process of care management and transition between levels of care, a quality review of the success of transition plans, and measuring engagement.

Consumers and their families should be educated about the benefits of maintaining their personal health care history. Ensuring that consumers have detailed information about their illnesses and treatment history will help ensure that providers have access to the information they need to provide appropriate care in a timely manner. The options here range from simple paper and pencil logs and medication histories to electronic records on memory sticks.

Consumer-driven recovery planning should include and the appropriate and necessary use of hospitalization. More thoughtful use of inpatient services could lead to a reduction in emergency room use and ultimately to a decrease in the number of hospitalizations.

Parties who collect data about mental health services and performance should share it with appropriate stakeholders in usable and timely ways. Many payers and public entities collect both population and individual specific information about mental health consumers and services. Population-based data should be shared with all stakeholders, including families and consumers to aid in enhancing the system of care.

There should be meaningful involvement of consumers and their advocates in all levels of system delivery and evaluation. Global involvement of consumers and their advocates in the care delivery process is essential. Examples include using peer specialists as part of a treatment team, active involvement in policy and planning, as well as involvement in developing and implementing performance measurement and evaluation.

While we have learned that maintaining continuity of therapy has a positive impact on consumer outcomes, the barriers and other impediments to ensuring this continuum of care have been long entrenched in mental health and related care systems. An unacceptably high number of people with serious psychiatric issues – including schizophrenia, depression and bipolar disorder – are “falling between the cracks” in the transition between acute inpatient settings and the community causing harm and disruption in their own lives and those of their families and often bringing their recovery process to a halt.

A continuity of therapy initiative is likely to decrease inappropriate use of emergency room services by consumers with schizophrenia or other serious mental illnesses by assuring consistency in the disease management approach used by all community provider organizations. Both of these likely outcomes of continuity of therapy provide cost reductions for the hospital and cost offset for the investments in continuity of therapy initiative and related therapies.

In addition, the continuity of therapy initiative provides the community hospital with another very tangible benefit. The continuity of therapy initiative provides the relationships, process, and infrastructure for an overall discharge planning functionality for all consumers with mental illnesses. This discharge planning functionality is a new, and critical, element in modern behavioral health standards that began in 2007.

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Symptoms of Schizophrenia and Treatment of Schizophrenia

Last Updated on Sunday, 1 August 2010 07:51 Written by Natural Health Team Tuesday, 15 September 2009 02:54

Commonly known as insanity or madness, schizophrenia is a chronic psychotic disorder with onset typically occurring in adolescence or young adulthood. Schizophrenia results in fluctuating, gradually deteriorating, or relatively stable disturbances in thinking, behavior, and perception. Severity can range from mild and subtle with very good adaptation to everyday life, to severely disabling requiring constant supervision in a restricted environment. . Schizophrenia is a brain disease that interferes with normal brain functioning. It causes affected people to exhibit odd and often highly irrational or disorganized behavior. Because the brain is the organ in the body where thinking, feeling and understanding of the world takes place (where consciousness exists), a brain disease like schizophrenia alters thinking, feeling, understanding and consciousness itself in affected persons, changing their lives for the worse. Causes of SchizophreniaExperts now agree that schizophrenia develops as a result of interplay between biological predisposition (for example, inheriting certain genes) and the kind of environment a person is exposed to. These lines of research are converging: brain development disruption is now known to be the result of genetic predisposition and environmental stressors early in development (during pregnancy or early childhood), leading to subtle alterations in the brain that make a person susceptible to developing schizophrenia. It’s not known what causes schizophrenia. However, researchers believe that an interaction of genetics and environment may cause schizophrenia. Problems with certain naturally occurring brain chemicals, including the neurotransmitters dopamine and glutamate, also may contribute to schizophrenia. Symtoms Of SchizophreniaBizarre or inappropriate behaviourPreoccupation with spiritual mattersIncoherent illogical speechDistorted Perceptions of RealityPeople with schizophrenia may have perceptions of reality that are strikingly different from the reality seen and shared by others around them. Living in a world distorted by hallucinations and delusions, individuals with schizophrenia may feel frightened, anxious, and confused. Cognitive symptoms (or cognitive deficits) are problems with attention, certain types of memory, and the executive functions that allow us to plan and organize. Cognitive deficits can also be difficult to recognize as part of the disorder but are the most disabling in terms of leading a normal life. Over time, it becomes difficult to function in daily life. You may not be able to go to work or school. You may have troubled relationships, partly because of difficulty reading social cues or others’ emotions. You may lose interest in activities you once enjoyed. Diagnosing SchizophreniaUsing mental state features alone (such as third person auditory hallucinations) is not a reliable way to diagnose schizophrenia. After all, psychotic features such as hallucinations and delusions can occur in affective disorders, dementia and acute organic psychoses. It is therefore important to look at the form of the illness as well as the content. Treatment of SchizophreniaPatients with schizophrenia often do not respond to treatment or only partially improve and remain functionally impaired. While medication has been found to be effective for the treatment of ?positive? symptoms of the disease, treatment of the ?negative symptoms? of depression (including lack of energy, motivation, and emotional range) has historically not been very successful. In nearly 25 percent of those patients, the condition is so refractory to neuroleptic pharmacotherapy that they require custodial care. First, ensure that your loved one is taking prescribed medications. One of the most common reasons that people with schizophrenia relapse into a new episode is that they quit taking medication. Family members might see much improvement and mistakenly assume medications may no longer be needed. That is a disastrous assumption. A later psychotic outbreak will likely happenThe large majority of people with schizophrenia show substantial improvement when treated with antipsychotic drugs. Some patients, however, are not helped very much by the medications and a few do not seem to need them. Therapy of SchizophreniaCognitive Behavioral Therapy has been shown to be good for a person with schizophrenia. Psychodynamic therapy is quite controversial. The actual therapy does not seem to work so well. When a person suffers from schizophrenia, it is helpful for the whole family to get support. This usually reduces stress and worry, and helps people cope.

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