The Concept of Schizophrenia
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The phenomenon of schizophrenia has been the subject of extensive research and theoretical discussion. Through time, besides some notions of a purely biologic cause of this phenomenon, two main approaches in trying to explain the origin of schizophrenia have dominated the debate. One approach explains schizophrenia as a genetically determined disease of the brain. The other approach concentrates rather on the environment as a cause of the ailment. Recently, a sizable part of the scientific community has considered a combination of both approaches, instead of concentrating on a single determining cause of schizophrenia. The purpose of this paper is to define and to describe the phenomenon of schizophrenia and then to discuss the two main approaches to its etiology and see to what extent they can indeed be combined. There will also be a discussion of those theories objecting altogether to the concept of schizophrenia as a mental illness. According to the definition given by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 1978, schizophrenic psychoses are "'A group of psychoses in which there is a fundamental disturbance of personality, a characteristic distortion of thinking, often a sense of being controlled by alien forces, delusions which may be bizarre, disturbed perception, abnormal affect out of keeping with the teal situation, and autism. Nevertheless, clear consciousness and intellectual capacity are usually maintained' " (Hughes, 1981, p. 10).
. . .
one twin is schizophrenic,
the other is much more likely to be so if the twins have identical genetic make-up (Waldinger, 1986, p. 91).
One of the major research programs that was supposed to yield some of the answers about what goes on in the schizophrenic brain was the six-year Landmark Study of identical twins funded by the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health. Earlier studies had shown that, if one identical twin has the disease, there is a 40 percent likelihood that the other twin will, too. This study wanted to find out what might be different about the 60 percent of identical twins who do not share the disease (McCrone, 1994, p. 40).
Despite exhaustive comparisons of twin pairs in which one was ill and the other healthy, there were few results. Nothing significant turned up in their developmental histories, such as traumatic births or low birth weights. Nor did the schizophrenic twins have a history of injury or serious illnesses. They were neither significantly more shy nor significantly more aggressive during childhood. The only hint of a positive finding was that a surprising number of the schizophrenic twins, and none of the well ones, showed an antibody reaction to a particular family of animal viruses, the
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1983
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page)
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