Chronic Schizophrenia
Chronic schizophrenia is primarily characterized by depression, social withdrawal, odd behavior, and under activity. However, all the Schizophrenic patients do not necessarily suffer from these symptoms, and hence these are termed as ‘negative’ symptoms.
Moreover, the individuals who’re suffering from chronic schizophrenia usually get the feeling that people are trying to get at them, while they don’t really react emotionally to these delusions.
More often than not, lack of conversation or interests and neglect of appearance are the biggest symptoms of chronic schizophrenia, while the longer-term state of this chronic disorder is mainly characterized by social withdrawal.
If such patients are left on their own, then they don’t mind spending long spans of time idling, and doing meaningless acts over and again. They’re not really self conscious under such schizophrenic attacks.
The treatment of such chronic schizophrenic disorder is not well-defined though cognitive behaviour therapy as well as Psychotherapy often proves to be useful, to help the cause. On the other hand, the positive symptoms like delusions and hallucinations can be taken care of, with the help of antipsychotic drugs, but they don’t really prove to be helpful against the negative symptoms.
In any case, the chronic schizophrenic patients exhibit extreme behavior where it is positive or negative. Likewise, the duration of either form, is usually quite longer and there are good chances that the disorder may easily relapse within a couple of months or so. A period of six months is considered to be a safer margin for the prevention of such chronic attacks.
There are several tests, which may test the symptoms of chronic Schizophrenia, though it is not possible to conclude anything with the help of these tests. Furthermore, there’s no proven master treatment available for these chronic schizophrenic disorders.
However, long term medication is one of the common criteria for the treatment for all forms of Schizophrenia. If it gets clubbed with other forms of nervous or mental disorders like split-personalities, the treatment becomes all the more difficult, while chronic schizophrenic disorders must not be confused with other mental disorders, nor treated along similar lines of such mental disorders.
Originally posted 2009-05-05 05:38:38.