Essay On Assessing Schizophrenia

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Past, Future, and Now: Assessing Schizophrenia
Katie Hilderbrand
Salem College – Mary Jacobsen

Past, Future, Now: Assessing Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia has always been a disorder shrouded in mystery. The misconceptions combined with a lack of knowledge of the disorder lead to a stigma to be placed upon people with the disorder.

I. Historical and Current Views
Schizophrenia has always been a disorder associated with madness (Reed, 2004). In every century, people with this disorder have been persecuted or pushed aside by society. Throughout history, it was believed an evil demon or god caused Schizophrenia (Reed, 2004). The only way to fix the strange behavior was to pray to the good god because only they could fix the problem. A perfect example of this is the Middle Ages, where there was a return to religious explanations that explained mental disorders to be caused by the devil and the only way to help the individual was by the Church. The Churches method of treatment included exorcism and even more harsh tortures if the exorcism did not work. Many people, especially women, with schizophrenia perished during these times of accusation.
It is not until the Church’s power begins to fade that science could rise to the forefront for the understanding and treatment of disorders. However, science’s reasoning for schizophrenia failed sometimes too. For instance, an explanation of schizophrenia that developed in the 1900’s by Freud believed that schizophrenia evolves from conditions that are caused by a world that is exceedingly strident towards individuals either by parents that have been unnurturing to their children or if they have experienced a trauma. However, in 1948 Frieda Fromm-Reichmann expanded on Freud’s ...

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...alized that Suzy needed help (Arieti, 1974; RC Psych, 2012; Beaverton, 2012).

However, Suzy is just one of many people who will develop schizophrenia. About 1.1% of the American adult population alone will develop schizophrenia at some point in their lives (NIMH, 2010). The ratio between men and women developing schizophrenia is the same, although there is a difference in the age of onset. Males tend to develop it early while females tend to develop it later in life (Robin, 2003). Although males and females tend to develop schizophrenia at the same rate. When it came to diagnosing schizophrenia in the past there used to be problems in part due to the lack of a good solid definition because of this it was hard to compare studies about schizophrenia because they were using different definitions (Robin, 2003). However, that changed when the DSM became narrower about t

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