2.2 Symptoms of schizophrenia
Paranoia is a symptom of schizophrenia wherein the subject cannot control feeling and thought. Schizophrenia is most often caused by deficiency of the neurotransmitter chemokine. Table 2 shows the dominant symptoms of schizophrenia.
Symptoms of schizophrenia
Symptom Delusional mood
Description Delusion is one of the most prominent symptoms of schizophrenia and can be explained as a staunch belief in something that is clearly false. Delusions can also be mood-congruent or mood-incongruent.
Symptom Attention deficiency
Description This symptom is seen in the preclinical stage of schizophrenia. The patient responds to a certain stimulus without a look at noise or involves the risk of attention deficiency.
Symptom Auditory hallucination
Description A patient suffering from auditory hallucination is often seen talking to himself and breaking into feigned laughter or is even seen crying. Auditory hallucinations also include criticism and calumny.
Symptom Disturbance of ego
Description In this symptom, self-other consciousness breaks up and the ego boundary becomes fuzzy. The patient believes that everyone knows his secret and he feels his own thoughts spread around.
Symptom Disturbance of thinking
Description The patient’s behavior is disorganized and thoughts are integrated loosely. His conversations become confused and the patient cannot speak logically.
What type of person tends to suffer from schizophrenia? A person with schizoid is often unsocial, introverted, lonely, and passive-dependent is more likely to suffer from schizophrenia. A person who was bullied in early childhood does not fight back and has a reactive attitude.
The symptoms of schizophrenia are usually divided into positive and negative categories. The former occurs with the pathological activity of the central nervous system, such as hallucination, a monologue, delusion, and excitement. The latter comprises the psychological inertia that occurs with decreased activity of the central nervous system, such as decreased motivation. Ego leakage symptom and broadcasting of thought are also sometimes observed.
Another impairment in cognitive function is that a schizophrenic patient tends to worry about unrelated stories, which may lead to attention deficit. A psychiatrist will tend to first detect decreased cognitive function of short-term memory and attentiveness as symptoms before positive or negative symptoms emerge.
A person suffering from schizophrenia can easily become stressed and overwhelmed with information. Normally, the information from sense organs is filtered by the hypothalamus in the brain. However, when information is more than what the brain can process, the hypothalamus filter functions. A schizophrenic patient cannot process normal amounts of information properly and thus exhibits symptoms of disorganization.
花村嘉英著（2015）「从认知语言学的角度浅析鲁迅作品－魯迅をシナジーで読む」より translated by Yoshihisa Hanamura