Bipolar Vs Schizophrenia

Although schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are similar, the diagnoses are far from being the same. Both may be mental disorder and may share some medications, but the symptoms can easily confuse a person. Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are widely misdiagnosed due to the traits they share.

According to NIMH, “schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder that affects how a person thinks, feels and behaves.” It is not as common as other mental disorders, and patients seem like they have lost touch with reality. These symptoms can be very disabling, and the symptoms normally start between the ages of 16 and 30. In very rare cases, kids have schizophrenia. There are three different types of symptoms: positive, negative, and cognitive. Schizophrenia,

Both show abnormal mood changes, sensitive feelings towards rejection or failure, and isolation. Patients of either disorder tend to isolate themselves from humanity because they can’t control their feelings. They lack social cues, good communication skills, and frequent mood swings for no apparent reason. Schizophrenics, for example, say very little in conversations and suddenly stop talking in the middle of their sentences. They will also drop out of school activities and other activities they used to do. Due to the trouble with social cues, they will have a hard time interpreting body language, gestures, voice tone, and eye contact, which would lead to not responding in the correct way, showing themselves as cold, distant, or removed. Bipolar disorder patients have a difficulty concentrating and lose interest in activities they once liked in depressive episodes. In manic episodes, patients are distracted very easily, so much so that they jump from item to item without finishing the first. They also are overly confident and have an overly-inflated self esteem. In fact, they will participate a lot more in risky behaviors, showing that they have no regard for risk

As said by the book Diagnosis: Schizophrenia by Rachel Miller and Susan E. Mason, “because there is often little or no logical relationship between the thoughts and feelings of a person with schizophrenia, the disorder has often been called ‘split personality.’” Schizophrenia is often classified as a single or a group of many disorders that has impaired thinking, emotions, and behaviors. Many patients will normally have heightened perceptions of their senses, such as sound and sight of colors, causing hallucinations through the lack of filtering of the sensory stimuli in the brain. More importantly, schizophrenics lose touch with reality if left untreated, causing them to halt interactions with other humans and lose their ability to keep themselves clean and maintain good