My Loved One Has Schizophrenia
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My loved one has schizophrenia. There are good days and bad days. Is there a permanent cure?
Schizophrenia is the most common mental illness. It’s often associated with images of people acting strangely, being aggressive, or being indecent.
For anyone who knows schizophrenia, it’s unpredictable and can be a challenge. It’s an illness where the lines between what’s real and what’s imaginary get blurred often. Patients with schizophrenia don’t understand their illness, so they don’t accept that they have a mental illness. This makes it hard to treat and predict their future.
One of the most common questions I get asked is:
- Sometimes he/she behaves absolutely normally and then there’s a complete change in behavior
- Even on medication, things aren’t always normal.
- They don’t resume their daily activities, even after years of treatment.
- Does this mean there’s no cure?
Some unusual things about schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a chronic and lifelong illness that goes through ups and downs.
If a person with schizophrenia never gets treatment, they’ll still go through periods of severe illness-related symptoms and periods with no symptoms at all.
The reasons for treatment are:
- The symptoms are often hard to manage. They can include aggression, which is the most common delusion in patients.
- The illness, if left untreated, will become very aggressive over time, requiring hospitalization and intensive care.
- Treatment has shown to be very effective in reducing symptoms and helping patients live a normal life.
If we leave schizophrenia untreated, there would be…
Schizophrenia can get worse over time. It might also keep the person in a psychotic state for a long time without them getting better on their own. The longer the symptoms go untreated, the harder it is to treat them with medicine. So, it’s important to treat schizophrenia as soon as possible.
One of the most common questions is, “How long will the medicine last?” To answer this, we need to understand how schizophrenia affects the brain.
Schizophrenia is thought to be caused by too much dopamine in the brain. Dopamine is a chemical that helps brain cells work properly. For more information about the mechanism of schizophrenia, please refer to other blogs that discuss it in more detail.
These high dopamine levels cause delusions, hallucinations, disorganization, and aggression, which are the main symptoms of schizophrenia. Current medical advances can’t lower these high dopamine levels, but they can block them from acting on brain cells and reduce the symptoms. So, the medicine needs to be taken for the rest of the person’s life.
This is a limitation of medical science right now.
However, the medicines available now are very helpful in controlling symptoms and preventing future relapses (repeated episodes).
In clinical practice, we don’t usually recommend stopping the medicine, but many patients do stop taking it for various reasons. I’ve noticed that the time it takes for a patient to relapse can vary a lot. Some patients relapse within a few days, while others may take years to develop symptoms again.
Many relatives and caregivers of patients get confused about the cause of their loved one’s behavior. Over time, caregivers often become burned out (both socially and financially) and start to believe that their patients are intentionally acting this way. This is not a reflection of the illness itself.
💡As a Psychiatrist, I want to reassure any caregivers reading this that Schizophrenia is a biological illness caused by multiple biochemical changes in the brain that the patient cannot control.
SUMMARY:
- Schizophrenia Definition: A chronic and lifelong mental illness characterized by delusions, hallucinations, disorganization, and aggression, caused by excessive dopamine in the brain.
- Treatment Challenges: Difficult to treat due to the blurred line between reality and imagination, patients’ lack of understanding of their illness, and the unpredictability of symptoms.
- Importance of Treatment: Early treatment is crucial to manage symptoms, reduce aggression, prevent hospitalization, and improve quality of life.
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