Global Prevalence of Schizophrenia

​Schizophrenia; a long-term mental disorder that involves breakdowns in the relation between thought, emotion, and behavior, which leads to defective perceptions, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion, and a sense of mental fragmentation. In a less medicinal manner, it is a chronic and severe mental disorder that overall affects the everyday thoughts, feelings, and actions of a human. I’m sure you have some sense to what that means, or maybe even what that looks like. Some people, myself included, have laughed at a schizophrenic’s episode. Have you ever thought of the concept of having a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other, both telling you what to do, as a reality? Have you ever taken into consideration how you would react if you had the voices that you hear in scary movies actually being in your head? The voices can range from subject to subject and insult to insult depending on the person. Most people don’t take that into consideration. In our society today, people believe that mass-shootings in a public school building or a local movie theater, and marathon bombings, and so on are the psychotic incidences performed by mentally ill, sick people. I agree; those who harm others in any way, shape, or form are those who have many problems going on in their head. However, what we tend to frequently forget is that a good majority of those criminals had regular, normal lives where they were loved and raised correctly. We think about all the wrong they have done, and put aside what good they could have done in their lives and the possibility of them having something wrong going on in their heads. I’m here today to inform you what really goes on in schizophrenic minds. I’m here today to persuade you to use both your head and heart when thinking about the individuals who constantly have voices in their head, telling them what to do and how to do things every day. I’m here today to entertain you with facts and statistics that you probably have never taken more than a few minutes to think about being true.

​It is vital to at least try to prevent the outbursts of schizophrenic patients. Yes, patients. A patient doesn’t have to be lying in a hospital bed to be called one. According to Saha et al., “there were no significant differences between males and females, nor between urban, rural, and mixed environments, although migrants and homeless people had higher rates of schizophrenia.” To be quite honest with you, I’m not surprised by that result. I already assumed that migrants and homeless people had higher rates of schizophrenia; however, I did think that economy and gender came into effect of the diagnosis. Males suffer more severely than women do and the symptoms do appear earlier in men than in women, but the percentages between the two aren’t drastically different. This disorder can affect anyone and everyone. Schizophrenia is global.

​The National Institute of Mental Health reported a prevalence of 1.1% of the U.S. adult population, which is approximately 3.2 million people, suffered from schizophrenia in the year of 2014. The disorder has a collection of physical brain problems and symptoms: schizoaffective disorder, bipolar and depressive disorders, autism, pervasive development disorders, obsessive compulsive disorder, Tourette’s disorder, anxiety and panic disorders, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorders. It also involves delusions, hallucinations, unorganized thinking and speech, immature and uncalled for behavior, social withdrawal, and lack of personal drive. Just like any other organ in the body, the brain can fail. Think about that for a minute: the brain can fail. The brain can fail from hearing voices and hallucinating. Would your brain survive?

A woman named Elizabeth Caudy published an article about what it’s like to be psychotic after rereading her journal that she kept when she had her schizophrenic episodes on Healthy Place, America’s Mental Health Channel. Caudy talked about “a parallel world that zoomed in and out of reality.” She was under the impression that people were following her. She said that most people think that when someone hears voices it’s about killing people, but in her case it’s not. Caudy referred to herself as “a polite schizophrenic psychotic” because she would approach strangers saying odd things and when they made it clear to her that they wanted no part in the conversation, she left them alone.