Symptom Categories

Schizophrenia is a disease that does not discriminate based on race, culture, social status, or gender. Anywhere in the world, in every culture, one person out of every hundred suffers from schizophrenia. Signs of schizophrenia may emerge in people as young as 15 or as late as one's forties, but it is most common for true psychotic symptoms to reveal themselves in the late teens and early twenties. Indeed, Emilio appears to follow this pattern.

His bizarre behaviors began in high school, with his first psychiatric hospitalization soon following. Interestingly, men seem to develop schizophrenia at an earlier age than women. The average age of onset of schizophrenia in men is 25 years, whereas 29 is the average age for women. Certain traits, such as having a relative with schizophrenia, increase a person's risk of developing the disease. We will discuss risk factors for schizophrenia in another section.

There are three categories of schizophrenic symptoms: positive, negative, and disorganized. Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, in his book Surviving Schizophrenia, explained that the adjective positive "... denotes those symptoms which are present and should be absent."

In simple terms, a positive symptom signals a behavior that shouldn't be there. Remember that positive as used here does not mean "good." An example of a positive symptom is hallucination. Hallucinations occur when someone hears, sees, smells, or feels things that are not really there. Emilio is hearing voices and although we do not know what they are saying, they seem to be contributing to his erratic behavior.

Another positive symptom is delusion. Delusions cause the patient to believe that people are reading their thoughts or plotting against them, that others are secretly monitoring and threatening them, or that they can control other people's minds.

Figure 2.1 Colored Positron Emission Tomography (PET) brain scan of a schizophrenic male patient during hallucination. Highlighted in orange are the active visual (at right) and auditory (upper center) areas of the brain, confirming that the patient has "seen and heard" a hallucination.

In simple terms, a positive symptom signals a behavior that shouldn't be there. Remember that positive as used here does not mean "good." An example of a positive symptom is hallucination. Hallucinations occur when someone hears, sees, smells, or feels things that are not really there. Emilio is hearing voices and although we do not know what they are saying, they seem to be contributing to his erratic behavior.

Another positive symptom is delusion. Delusions cause the patient to believe that people are reading their thoughts or plotting against them, that others are secretly monitoring and threatening them, or that they can control other people's minds.