Psychology - Schizophrenia

Positive Symptoms: Sypmtoms that involve a sort of excess including: hallucinations, delusion and catatonia. 

Negative Symptoms: Symptoms that involve a sort of lacking including: affective flattening, lack of emotion in the voice/face, alogia which is a lack of coherent sentences and avolition which is a lack of goal directing behaviour. 

Issues Surrounding DIagnosis - 

The DSM IV/V was last published in 1994, and is widely used around the world. (DSMV=2013).

ICD10. This isn't used as widely used in the UK, mainly used in Europe. When each of these are used diagnosis will differ as they're different diagnostive material. 

• S - Early versions of diagnostic material were not very reliable.
• E - Beck (1962) found that key terms weren't clearly defined and clincians used differing interview techniques. 
• E - This means diagnosing patients wouldn't of been accurate, creating an issue when defining what schizophrenia actually is. 
• L - Therefore the reliability of diagnostic material is questioned. 
• S - Diagnostic material may not be totally reliable.
• E  - Rosenhan (1973) found that 8 'normal' people could get themselves admitted to mental hospitals as schizophrenics, just by claiming they heard voices saying things like 'thud'.
• E - This suggests that diagnostic material isn't reliable enough in terms of it's complexity. 
• L - This shows that diagnostic material is not totally reliable. 
• S - There are cultural differences 
• E - Copeland (1971) gave a description of a patient to 134 US psychiatrists and 194 British psychiatrists. 69% of US psychiatrists diagnosed schizophrenia, but only 2% of British psychiatrists gave the same diagnosis. 
• E - This indicates that the differences between diagnosis material make a huge impact on the diagnosis of schizophrenia.
• L - This shows that there should be a universal diagnostic material. 

• S - Stigmas can reduce validity of diagnosis.
• E - Kim and Berrios (2001) found that in Japan the idea of a 'disorganised mind' is so stigmatised that psychiatrists are reluctant to tell patients that they have schizophrenia. Only 20%of those with schizophrenia are actually diagnosed with it. 
• E - This shows the real issue with stigmas, as it results in a large amount of people not actually being diagnosed and therefore cannot recieve treatment. 
• L - This clarifies how stigmas can reduct the validity of the diagnosis of schizophrenia. 
• S - Schizophrenia has no pathognomic symptoms.
• E - Only 75% of schizophrenics suffer from hallucinations and delusions so this cannot be a pathognomic symptom. 
• E - This means that it's hard to differenciate schizophrenia from other mental illnesses as there're not a symptom that is unique to it. 
• L- This shows that the validity of diagnosis is weakened as there is no certain way to tell if someone has schizophrenia or if it's something else.