John Cadigan Schizophrenia Summary

In 1991, during his senior year of college, John Cadigan experienced his first break from reality at just twenty-one years old. During this onset, Cadigan began suffering from acute psychosis, but as his symptoms worsened, his family helped him to seek treatment, where he was finally diagnosed with schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a severe psychological disorder characterized by disorganization in thought, perception, and behavior. People with this disease do not think logically, perceive the world correctly, or behave in a way that permits everyday life and work.

In looking at the symptoms John as well as many other patients with schizophrenia experience, two broad categories emerge under which the symptoms of schizophrenia fall: positive symptoms

The two most common positive symptoms associated with schizophrenia are delusions and hallucinations. Delusions are fixed beliefs that are not changeable when presented with conflicting evidence. John Cadigan had persecutory delusions, believing that everyone was working together to harm him, delusions of reference, thinking that people on television were sending him personal messages, and somatic delusions, claiming that frogs were in his stomach eating away at his intestines. He also explained that he has a hard time determining what was reality and what was not. Hallucinations, however, are false sensory perceptions. Cadigan says that he often has violent images of using a knife on his mother and family members, and he sometimes thinks he is evil, but he knows he would never hurt anyone. In addition to delusions and hallucinations, another positive symptom of schizophrenia includes disorganized thinking, which is typically assessed by abnormal speech patterns. Strange speech patterns are due to the deterioration in cognitive functioning of people with schizophrenia. An example of this disorganized thinking is thought blocking,