Schizophrenia is a mental illness or psychiatric disorder with serious symptoms such as delusions, hallucinations and unclear thinking patterns that impact behavior and emotions. While the exact root cause of this illness cannot be identified, a combination of factors such as genetic, environmental and neurological can be cited as the cause. According to World Health Organization (WHO) statistics, about 20 million people in the world suffer from schizophrenia.

This illness is treatable through medicines and psychological support though half of the people diagnosed with this illness will have a permanent impairment. Symptoms of schizophrenia include:

1. Depression
One of the most common occurrences in this disorder is Depression which is the continuous feeling of helplessness and sadness and disinterest in any activity. The patient’s depressed state of mind makes it even more complicated to treat this illness.

2. Social withdrawal
Any mental illness including schizophrenia affects the social life of the patient and people close to the patient. The impact of the symptoms of schizophrenia on the patients is that they become socially withdrawn, do not like to mingle with others and become fearful and anxious about having to participate in any social initiatives. And this becomes a catch-22 situation for them. The more symptoms they have in public, the more withdrawn they become and the more withdrawn they become, the more socially awkward they become.

3. Hostility or suspiciousness
One of the common kinds of delusion that schizophrenia patients suffer is Persecutory delusion. As part of this delusional state, they believe people/entities are out to harm them. They believe they are being attacked unfairly, being harmed, followed and mistreated. This leads to the patients being hostile and suspicious of people and organizations around them.

4. Deterioration of personal hygiene
The lack of personal hygiene is a direct result of the patient’s depressed state. The patients do not feel motivated to conduct basic everyday activities such as brushing, showering, changing of clothes, keeping their surroundings clean etc. This deterioration of personal hygiene leads to other ancillary issues such as confrontational behavior with caretakers or family members, when asked to maintain proper hygiene.

5. Lack of emotion or inappropriate emotional outbursts
The stress, anxiety and suffering that schizophrenia patients undergo, results in them losing control over their emotions. Sometimes this stress wells up in the form of anger. A lot of provocation is not needed for the patients to react aggressively. But sometimes the same stress causes the opposite impact where the patients go deeper and deeper into a cocoon and shows no empathy, emotion or feelings for anything happening around them.

6. Oversleeping or insomnia
This is another contradicting characteristic where sometimes the patient suffers from sleep disorders due to the illness. This is primarily because they are not able to maintain a set routine and hence sleep patterns are not consistent. And for the same reason they might also sleep at odd times and oversleep to compensate for several days of insomnia.

7. Lack of concentration
Schizophrenia patients cannot easily focus. They have a lot of trouble aligning thoughts and expressing ideas. Disorganized thinking causes confusion. Depressed state causes apathy and this results in them not being able to concentrate on a task, on a thought process, on an idea or an action. There is a significant breakdown in the connection between a thought, an action and associated emotion for these patients.