Question

Contrast schizophrenia with a dissociative identity disorder.

Answer 1

Schizophrenia is a psychotic mental disorder which involves a severe breakdown of neurocognitive, behavioral and emotional functioning that leads to interpersonal and social maladpatations. It has a strong genetic basis and is marked by abnormalities of hormones and neurotransmitters like dopamine in the brian.

Schizophrenia is often termed as ‘split brain’ condition as the individual is severely split or cut off from his/her reality.

On the other hand, Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is a perosnality disorder which involves a fragmentation or split within the identity of the individual such that s/he may present different often distinct personalities, where each identity or ‘alter’ is unaware of the existence of the other alter.

Moreover, schizophrenia is accompanied by symptoms such as thought derailment, neologisms or construction of new grammatically incohesive words and phrases, hallucinations and delusions. Schizophrenics therefore show an inability to carry out their everyday activities and gradually lose their ability to work and manage their relationships. People with Dissociative identity disorders however may show greater levels of proficiency in one of their alters but they may feel greater anxiety and a feeling of disorientation when they find themselves in an unfamiliar environment due to the change in the identity state. They are more prone to forgetting or amnesia, anxiety and may have difficulty recalling information in one identity state if they learned the information previously in another identity state.