Nightwalk Mental Illness

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder often characterized by abnormal social behaviour and failure to recognize what is real. Common symptoms include false beliefs, unclear or confused thinking, auditory hallucinations, reduced social engagement and emotional expression, and inactivity. A person with schizophrenia often hears voices, experiences delusions and hallucinations and may believe thoughts, feelings and actions are controlled or shared by someone else.

“Schizoaffective disorder is a chronic mental health condition mainly characterized by its symptoms of schizophrenia,

Schizophrenia is a complex psychotic disorder evident by impaired thinking, emotions, judgment and behaviors. The person’s grasp of reality may be so disordered that they are unable to filter sensory stimuli and may have intense perceptions of sounds, colors, and other features of their environment. Although there are different levels of severity in symptoms, the Gale Encyclopedia of Medicine (Fundukian, Ed., 2014) states that schizophrenia may typically interfere with a person 's ability to think clearly and to know the difference between reality and fantasy. People with schizophrenic symptoms have hallucinations and delusions, and often have difficulty with everyday life. It is a complicated disease that is not well understood and carries significant stigma for its sufferers.

Schizophrenia is a mental ailment in which the person inflicted is taunted by uncontrollable voices heard inside their heads and very vivid, realistic hallucinations. The voices and hallucinations can be benevolent, but they can also be violent. Many cases constitute of people being told by such voices to hurt themselves or others. People who suffer from Schizophrenia are often isolated from society and admitted into psychiatric wards and mental institutions for the majority of their lives. The general public does not understand the torment that these people go through on a day-to-day basis. In order to give readers insight into the mind of a schizophrenic, the poet Jim Stevens uses the depleting condition and turmoil taking place inside

It is easier to impose a sense of insanity than it is to disprove the other way. The novel Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer depicts and closely analyzes the actions and dispositions of a young man, Chris McCandless, who ventured off into the wilderness to look for spiritual freedom away from all the corruptions of society. Though in the writings of Krakauer, it is evident that Chris McCandless can be characterized as a pilgrim, however, he is nothing more than a reckless kid with many poor attributes that eventually cost him his life. It could appear ironic to some, how his narcissistic side blinded him from reality, causing him to detach from any interactions with humanity.

In the world today, there are many illnesses and disorders that affect people each and every day. One illness in particular that is very big in the US and all around the world is Schizophrenia. It is also the most researched topic. A person who is diagnosed with Schizophrenia lives a very different lifestyle than someone who is not. Many people would consider a person with schizophrenia to be “crazy.” Sadly enough, people with this illness do posses symptoms that might come off as crazy or insane. There are many different causes that come along with schizophrenia. A person who is diagnosed may not know it at first but they do later realize that they have some interesting thoughts, depending on the type of symptoms they posses while having this illness. Although the symptoms may be very brutal and causes cannot be controlled, there still is hope and treatments for individuals who have schizophrenia.

SCHIZOPHRENIA Schizophrenia, from the Greek word meaning “split mind”, is a mental disorder that causes complete fragmentation in the processes of the mind. Contrary to common belief, schizophrenia does not refer to a person with a split personality or multiple personalities, but rather to a condition which affects the person’s movement, language, and thinking skills. The question of whether schizophrenia is a disease or collection of socially learned actions is still a question in people’ mind. People who are suffering from schizophrenia think and act in their own the world and put themselves in a way that is totally different from the rest of society. In other words, they have lost in touch with the reality. Most schizophrenics accept

Schizophrenia is responsible for life-long mental illness that presents an abnormal reality to those diagnosed with it. It can cause hallucinations, delusion, decreased motivation and judgement, erratic behavior, substance abuse, among other symptoms. Schizophrenia and mental illness, in general, can be a tricky subject in terms of an accurate portrayal. However, even inaccurate portrayals can help readers understand its implications. The way that authors write schizophrenic characters and their relationships in their works can leave an enduring impact. Considering only the following story of a likely schizophrenic protagonist, readers are presented a sensible mentally ill character who may not have a happy ending but does leave a lasting impression in those readers who become familiar with him. In Young Goodman Brown, Hawthorne touches on the reality of those inflicted with such mental illnesses as schizophrenia and does not shy away from showing the dark implications it may have on their life.

Is this the narrator's attempt to understand the self or soul? To regain an essence of power and understanding of who she is becoming or has become? Is there a larger question here which the reader, through the narrator, must ask? Does not the narrator's disintegration or depression become but a symbol of her search for self? There is a belief, one I personally share, that depression is part of the soul's cycles--a place or time where opposing forces struggle with reason.

Schizophrenia affects 1.1% of people in the world, and in the usa it affects 2.6 million adults 18 or older. schizophrenia can lead to symptoms that are more mild or symptoms that transform into disasters. Jacob from “The Hitchhiker” by Anthony Horowitz exhibits the symptoms that come with paranoid schizophrenia almost perfectly. This type of schizophrenia that Jacob has quickly escalates to the extremes...murder. Jacob has already murdered his own brother and claims to have had nothing to do with it. He hears voices and sees things that nobody else sees or hears. Jacob form “The Hitchhiker” definitely has schizophrenia because of his actions and extreme behaviors.

Additional, inferences about the disorder are provided by Whitcomb and Merrell (2013). The authors characterize the symptoms of schizophrenia as delusions that are “typically bizarre and implausible” and pronounced hallucinations such as hearing voices for long periods of time (p. 363). Additional, impairments noted by the authors include “severe disturbances in perception, thought and affect, a severe decline in personal and social functioning, poor personal hygiene, inability to function effectively at school or work, and a severe impairment in social relationships” (Whitcomb and Merrell, 2013 p.363).

Schizophrenia is a disease that has plagued societies around the world for centuries, although it was not given its formal name until 1911. It is characterized by the presence of positive and negative symptoms. Positive symptoms are so named because of the presence of altered behaviors, such as delusions, hallucinations (usually auditory), extreme emotions, excited motor activity, and incoherent thoughts and speech. (1,2) In contrast, negative symptoms are described as a lack of behaviors, such as emotion, speech, social interaction, and action. (1,2) These symptoms are by no means concrete. Not all schizophrenic patients will exhibit all or even a majority of these symptoms, and there is some

Although schizophrenia seems like a rare illness, there are an estimated 1.5 million people in the United States alone who suffer from this disorder (“Schizophrenia” 3). The most common form of this mental illness is paranoid schizophrenia, which is defined as a chronic mental illness in which a person loses touch with reality and is preoccupied with delusions (“Mental Health and Schizophrenia” 5). Symptoms of this disorder include auditory hallucinations, delusions, anxiety, anger, emotional distance, violence, argumentativeness, suicidal thoughts and behaviors, and self-important or condescending manner. Auditory hallucinations are when one hears sounds, usually voices, that are not real. The voices will give criticisms, insults, and commands (“Paranoid Schizophrenia” 5). Delusions are false beliefs that one refuses to give up despite being proved wrong with facts, a very common one being that someone is out to get the person (“Mental Health and Schizophrenia” 13). However, one could also have delusions of grandeur, which are false impressions of one’s own importance. Delusions can lead to aggression or violence if one believes they must defend themselves against those who want to cause them harm (“Paranoid Schizophrenia” 4). The narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” clearly has paranoid schizophrenia because he displays the symptoms of auditory hallucinations, delusions, violence or aggression, and anxiety.

This weariness with life is a symbol of schizoid suicide, which leads into withdrawal into death, into a ghostly world. In the unconscious, the narrator believes that the corruption of relationships through sexual contact brings nothingness. This again indicates the presence of a schizoid element in his mind. A person with a schizoid mind seeks isolation. Union with a woman will not take him into the path of separateness, so he buries the woman. Now he can be free. He is alone but alive. In the process, he is denouncing the "inferior" half of himself, the woman in him, the part that he fears may corrupt and make him diseased. He expresses the intolerable perplexity of woman as a focus of appearance and reality.

Schizophrenia is defined by the American Psychological Association as, “a serious mental illness characterized by incoherent or illogical thoughts, bizarre behavior and speech, and delusions or hallucinations, such as hearing voices.” Though only effecting 1% of the population, the complex and long-term psychological disorder interferes greatly with the daily life of those diagnosed. Victims of schizophrenia often experience a combination of positive (hallucinations, delusions, disorganized speech/thinking/behavior, catatonic behavior, etc…), negative (affective flattening, alogia, avolition), and cognitive (difficulty understanding, poor memory, difficulty integrating thoughts, feelings and behavior) symptoms. In the movie Shutter Island, the main character repeatedly shows the gradual increase of subtle signs of both schizophrenia and PTSD.