Abnormalities of thinking, feeling, and perception; these are all affected. The global impairment of our brains, of all of our complex functions has occurred. Very often, a person might go into psychosis, or the withdrawal from everyone and everything that is familiar and known. It can lasts for years, and there is no cure or no real way to help the victims. In order to understand the patients disease, we can break it down into thirds. The first third, the victim might have a schizophrenic attack once or twice, and they carry on life as if nothing ever happened. The middle third receives the attacks on an off and on basis, and they do benefit from therapy. The last and most serious third are called chronic schizophrenics. They never recover from the disease and no amount of therapy will ever help them. Since their disease will last years and years, brain damage occurs because of the chemicals that cause the disease. The disorder attacks the highest functions of our brain, those are the exact same functions that separate us from animals.
To bear a child that is so different from the others, that is considered such an outcast, that alone is a tremendous difficulty that the parents must live with. Schizophrenia has been considered a disease that is caused by the way that the child is nurtured. For many years, this has been the common belief and thus was accepted. Recently, however, scientists have begun to start to study and to question that old hypophysis. Not to long ago the disease was thought of being psychoanalysis, or caused by trauma inflicted by the family, by the early childhood experiences of the patient. Although that was also believed for quiet some time, it was proven to be incorrect. Schizophrenia is not caused during or because of ones childhood. In the last twenty-five or thirty so years, we have determined that our genetics have a very strong factor in the development of schizophrenia. Although it is true that if someone in your family has the disease, you will also develop it. Although there are also many cases in which relatives of one individual have the disease, and yet that individual never inherits it or maybe they just don’t develop it.
Mrs. Owens had a son that has recently developed schizophrenia. A major part of her family has the disease, and yet she never expected to be personally attacked by it. She says you try to find a person that looks, acts, speaks, and even walks like your son, and then you try to substitute this new son with your old one. One of the first signs of the disease that her son showed was that he drew a type of universe on the back of a mirror. It was quite neatly and nicely drawn, there were many words that accompanied the drawing that had little if any meaning in the human language at all. One day, hen the son was alone in the house, his voices in his head told him to amputate one of his own toes. His mother believes that he was in a different place, space, or even universe when he committed this. Stress from the outside environment has a major effect on how the victim will act. If the area in which you live in is stressful, noisy, and such; then the patient will have a much harder time to recover if he or she ever recovers. But if they live in a suburban area, where it is relatively quiet and it has a nice natural setting, then it will be much easier for the victim to recover.
Schizophrenia is mostly considered a disorder that is a grouping of different disorders. We must approach it with different tools. The hippocampal cells relate to the ways that we feel, the way we feel with the area around us. Also, the arrangement of the nerve cells has a lot to deal with the disorder. In a normal human beings brain, the nerve cells are arranged in rows, everything seems that it is in order. However, when you take a same of a schizophrenics brain, the nerve cells are completely spread out. They seem to be in total chaos, no order is present what so ever.
When Gerry goes on a visit home, he constantly asks the driver and tells the driver that the police are going to kill him. He constantly blows things out of proportion, he states that he can lift two thousand pounds, when in reality he would never be able to lift that physically. When he gets home, he constantly argues and yells at his father. He states that his father wants to kill him, and he even asks the father why is he going to kill him. He later also admits that he is afraid of his father, he says that he is a good father, and even though of his age, he is till able to kick his ass. He also states that a certain doctor told him that he is so sane that he is insane. He constantly is repeating that he has no fun at all, never any fun, and so on. All his father has to say to this is that it is hard to raise this type of child, especially since it is there only child. Ever since he was a young boy, he was given everything that was possible for him. The parents were constantly trying to make life easier for him that they had it themselves.
Heather is also a schizophrenic. She states that she has kryptonite inside of her body, and she has to drink lots of coffee and pop in order to keep it down. She also says that she has a monopoly in the coffee industry. She asks the reporter frequently if he eats raw eggs. She believes that boys are the ones that get pregnant and not girls. She has been put in and out of private hospitals to house her, but now that all the money that was ever saved up has been spent, her parents are faced with the task to take her into a public facility. The difference between the two is tremendous. The public institutions are just like jails, you don’t receive the nurturing that you so badly need. She is being almost forced by her parents to go back to the institutions so that she can be allowed to visit her parents again, but she hates and despises that place.
For a doctor, it is very hard to describe the sadness, the anger, and the pain that you would feel if you had to be faced with the task of heading a ward in a hospital that houses schizophrenics, for the simple reason that there is no cures and there aren’t really any ways to treat the patients. One method that is used to ease down a tense and nervous patient is that they are forced into a bath tub full of cool water, then a canvas is put over it so that they will actually stay there. Drugs were brought from France for the victims. Now we are able to see the patients as people with diseases, not as freaks. It is almost like a person that is going to have an operation. Even eight days before the operation the patient is feeling stressful, anxiety, and nervous. But with a certain kind of drug, the patients become mentally relaxed, and thus there must be some sort of physiological link. Any type of drug that had the possibility of being useful was tested. A number of compounds were given, and their restlessness left them, they began to sleep. This is a great advancement because some of these people haven’t slept for two, three, four, even five months on end. Augustine is another schizophrenic. Today he is feeling ok. He has many thoughts going through is head, but none of them make any sense. He states that he would like to be either: war leader, doctor, or priest. Physically, he looks like a mess; his hair is long and uncombed and he has a beard. He was about to change medications, and he was looking forward to that. After the medication change, he looks completely different. He got a hair cut, and his beard is gone. His goals are also more solid, he plans to get a job now, and his thoughts have cleared up. All the drugs that are being used block never cells from exchanging information. All of the drugs ease the chemical in the brain know as dopamine.
Circumstances in our environment can change a person. Emotions can change the biochemistry of our brains, and this can answer at least a few questions that will be brought up in the future. Ever though the drugs have great benefits, they aren’t perfect. The drugs contain terrible side effects, such as gross movement disorders, impotence, and even apathy. Also, drugs don’t cure schizophrenia, they merely control its symptoms. For now, we can use what we have, but we are in a constant mission in order to find the cure for all of this madness that a few of us face on a daily basis.
“States of Mind”
The study of brain science is explored by the study of many different small bits and pieces of information that we are able to put together from what we have learned so far. Since brain science is a very hard to study area of our human bodies, we still are very uncertain about most parts of that system. When we study our vision, we aren’t talking about what we see, but what we perceive. For now, tools that we have developed such as brain tissue transplants or new drugs have just been tools on the mission to try to find an explanation to all of this. The attribute that we consider when we talk about brain science is awareness. Brain science is basically to ability to know who you are at any given time and where you are. When we go to sleep, that is the one time that any animal is most vulnerable. Why then would we risk so much just to sleep? Well, the benefits out weight the negative effects so much that we can consciously choose to go to sleep without any problems. When we sleep, our brain is still functioning, but the impulses that are usually sent to our muscles are blocked out and aren’t sent anymore. When we sleep, we of course dream. We dream not only for mental reasons but also for physical reasons. Sleeping and dreaming were put together during one experiment in 1962. It was found out that every 90 minutes we go into a type of sleep called REM sleep, standing for Rapid Eye Movement. During these intervals, we are dreaming. Our eyes move constantly, our brain is basically processing information but without the help of the visual cortex. It was also discovered that the fetus in a womb of a pregnant woman also experiences of REM sleep; but it is a different type of REM because we dream from experiences, and that is impossible for the fetus.
Dr. Hobson states that is still in debate wether dreams benefit us in our life or not. Sleep and dreams both occur because of chemical reactions in our brains, it mostly occurs in a specific part of the brain. Dr. Hobson also concluded that the pons turn on the brain, signals are then sent to the frontal cortex. The frontal cortex then decides what to perceive from what we see in the physical world. When we dream, it is a sensory experience. We are experiencing the creative thinking of our brain, because our frontal cortex has to “imagine” what we would normally see just from thoughts that our brains have thought up.
What happens when the changes in our personality become uncontrollable? Tony is a multiple personality (MP) patient that suffers from the disorder. He has at least 53 different personalities; of those there are: Tony the original; Richard, Tony’