Victim To My Own Thoughts: A Case Study

Victim To My Own Thoughts

    On September 16th, 2013, there were twelve murdered and three injured. At the age of 34, Aaron Alexis fired shots at a Naval Sea Command Headquarters where he was discharged from for “exhibiting a pattern of misbehavior”. Aaron was said to have schizophrenia that was not treated nor noticed even after the symptoms that were exhibited through his “unnatural behaviors” (Shear 1). There are better ways for people who have schizophrenia to be recognized and treated other than medications. Elyn R. Saks, a past patient, states that “mainstream treatment may actually make it harder for people to cope with daily life and work.” Schizophrenia is shown to stem more from past traumas rather than something that is wrong genetically,

so taking an understanding of where the voices come from is more helpful than “trying to suppress them with drugs” (Glazer 2).

Despite the fact,  doctors vocalize that it would be more effective to start treatment earlier rather than later” to ensure a better future, but they pay no mind to the consequences of taking the antipsychotics they prescribe (“Living With Schizophrenia” 1). Psychologists spend more time trying to find a cure for schizophrenia, and in result they aren’t doing enough research on the treatments that could potentially help a patient through more than just medication.

Schizophrenia, meaning split mind, is a chronic mental disorder characterized by an array of symptoms, and it affects 1% of our world’s population. The meaning split mind is to show how each person that lives in this mental state have different characterizations in each small fragment of their mind.  It’s shows up in both men and women starting from their late teens to early thirties. Studies show that the basis of understanding where it comes from is the occurrence of “abnormalities in [the] neurotransmission” which can start with either an excess or a deficiency of neurotransmitters. These neurotransmitters include serotonin, dopamine, and glutamate. It is also found that schizophrenia has

emerged as a result of the “discovery that lysergic acid diethylamide enhanced the effects of serotonin in the brain” (“Schizophrenia, Overview and Treatment Options” 1). Although there are no real causes discovered for the development, there are few things that lead to an idea of how the mental illness comes about.  Those who obtain the mental illness suffer side effects that change the way they move about in their everyday life. There are five different kinds of schizophrenia, starting with paranoia. This can bring a patient extreme suspicion, disorganized schizophrenia can cause “incoherent thoughts,” there are catatonic symptoms which cause withdrawal-like symptoms making a person more likely to isolate themselves and a shutdown in their psychomotor. Residual schizophrenia leaves horrific hallucinations in one’s mind which can go away but the motivation to live out their everyday life may be gone, and finally, schizoaffective disorder can link bipolar disorder and schizophrenia into one (Parekh 3). Each of these can obtain many different side effects that can be placed into three main categories. The symptoms that are labeled positively are the delusions or hallucinations. In these hallucinations, they can use all five senses to create a whole different scenario in their mind compared to what is actually happening at that particular moment. There are negative symptoms, which can be mistaken for depression because of the loss of emotion or “lack of expression”  in how they feel (Parekh 4). Lastly, cognitive symptoms can leave a person with a lack of memory and attention causing them trouble when trying to lead a normal life. In the long run, this mental illness can affect everything about a person’s life, and it can all start with the treatment they need to take to live with it.
Schizophrenia is primarily treated with the antipsychotics that are prescribed to them.

There are many different kinds of medications but as Dr. Krishna Patel wrote in “Modern Treatments”, the most common are Risperdal, Seroquel, and Zyprexa. After the failure of two antipsychotic medications doctors typically give patients Clozaril. Clozaril has one major side effect that is the most defective which is the “deficiency of white blood cells” (Piotrowski 3). White blood cells help fight bacteria and other illnesses and when those are destroyed the patient becomes more prone to development of other diseases.  Each of these medications has different side effects that can damage the patient who is taking them. Based off of the overproduction of serotonin and dopamine the medication is used to block all production of each of these chemicals. Yvette Brazier writes in “Medical News Today” that serotonin acts as a neurotransmitter which helps send signals from one side of the brain to the other, and it can also be found in the digestive tract. Another chemical that is overproduced is dopamine. Lex Wunderink, a psychiatrist at University Medical Center, stated dopamine is a necessary for all people because it is a chemical that primarily deals with motivated behavior and has a direct relationship with memory, motor movement, sleep, libido, and addiction. Blocking off each of these chemicals may help the side effects of schizophrenia, but they create new problems for patients to cope

with. The most extensive part of those side effects is depression and anxiety. Depression can have the largest effect on one with this mental illness because the hallucinations inside their head are cruel, and “culminating in commands to harm [themselves],” and depression is already a major factor in one’s choice to harm themselves or commit suicide. The medications have also been said to “increase the risk of diabetes or disfiguring lifelong tremors” which includes symptoms almost identical to those of parkinson's disease (Glazer 2).  Berta Britz was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a teen and although she endured treatment it only suppressed the voices she heard. The medications made her gain “enormous amounts of weight and feel zombielike” until she discovered a different way to deal with her voices. Britz is not the only patient to report developing these kinds of symptoms along with the problem of diabetes and akathisia. Akathisia is a feeling the evolves in a person’s mind that they are “unable to sit still” (Glazer 4). The only treatment for these side effects is more antibiotics.
    Medication should not be the number one treatment to help people with this mental illness. “Patience is needed” to understand what is truly going on in each victim (“Living With Schizophrenia” 1). “The genetic factors are so different from one individual to the next” showing that the medication can not truly help every part of what is going on inside of each of them (Balter 3). The main idea of treating a patient is to help them get better, and using the medications that are prescribed lessens the chance of recovery shown in the study by Martin Harrow, a college professor of psychology at University of  Illinois College of Medicine. Compared to the ones who did, “those not taking antipsychotics experienced significantly less psychotic activity” over 20 years showing that in the long run it was better for them to not take the prescribed antipsychotics. Medications help suppress the trauma, therapy can help one cope with it. Suppressing and coping are two very diverse things when it comes to this topic. To suppress the illness is to try to get rid of it completely, and that is impractical because of the fact that there has yet to be the discovery of a cure. To help a patient cope with their mental illness is to help them live with what they can not alleviate. There are a multitude of coping mechanisms as every person is unique, but they need to be put into use to help each each person.
    The mass of feedback given by an abundance of patients along with the many studies that have been done is proof enough that medication is not the best way to treat patients. Schizophrenia is vastly unknown because of how uncommon it is, and trying to treat something that there is not enough information on can be very hard. Although as severe as this mental illness is, patients need something to help them cope with what they can not easily discard. If there is not enough information on an antipsychotic that can help them without bringing about another mass of side effects, then there should be a development of different coping mechanisms.  treatment to help each patient with how to cope and manage the things that go on in their head.