Question

What are the three major classes of symptoms of schizophrenia?

Answer 1

Schizophrenia is a severe psychotic disorder which is characterised by cognitive and behavioural deficits. It involves three distinct categories or classes of symptoms. These include:

Positive symptoms which describe the presence of peculiar behaviour and cognitive tendencies including hallucinations, delusions, disorganised speech, Catatonia.

Negative symptoms which denote deficits or breakdown of normal cognitive processes interpersonal and social behaviours such as anhedonia, lack of self care, social withdrawal, flat affect, thought derailment.

Cognition symptoms which pertain to inability to process information and make decisions, difficulty in sustaining attention, problems in memory and learning new tasks, breakdown of normal speech and development of peculiarities in langauage such as cognitive neologism or formulating one’s own words which are not comprehensible by others speaking the same language, or ‘word salad’ such as by combining different phonemes and morphemes in grammatically incorrect patterns.

While These symptoms help in making a diagnosis and identification of the presence of Schizophrenia, all of the symptom symptoms may not be typically present in all the individuals and they may also vary in intensity.