Psychosomatic Causes of Schizophrenia

The oddities in a person’s behavior concern family and friends, so they do everything to get the person to see a doctor. Hearing the diagnosis “schizophrenia,” they believe the person is doomed. For those uninitiated, the diagnosis sounds shocking due to insufficient and superficial knowledge about this personality disorder.

What is Schizophrenia and How it Manifests

Schizophrenia is a hereditary pathology associated with changes at the neuroanatomical and neurochemical levels. This personality disorder is treated with medication prescribed by a psychiatrist.

Attention: The disease can start both in childhood and in adulthood. However, the time of onset of the mental disorder determines the severity of the illness. If diagnosed before the age of 21, the disease is severe. If the pathology is diagnosed after 40, patients tend to cope better.

Main External Signs of Schizophrenia

Signs of a psychotic disorder include auditory, taste, and visual hallucinations, which change the patient’s behavior: they become anxious, suspicious, aggressive, depressed, lose touch with reality, and cannot distinguish what is real from what is illusory.

People with schizophrenia cannot hide their ailment from others because they have certain peculiarities in thinking. In formulating their thoughts, they cannot coherently express them. They struggle to maintain a logical line in their narrative.

They often share suspicions with others that they are being watched, want to be killed, or poisoned. According to patients, their lives are controlled by supernatural forces that predetermine all events of their lives.

Important: Facing misunderstanding from others, they try to minimize their contacts with people, preferring solitude. They are suspicious of people, seeing them as enemies.

Risk of Developing Schizophrenia

The risk of developing the disease is determined genetically. For children, it is high if:

  • This disorder is diagnosed in one or both parents. If the mother is ill, the likelihood of the child developing the disease is five times higher than if the father is ill. If twins are born in a family where one parent suffers from a psychotic disorder, the risk of pathology in the children is higher. Even if the child is placed in an orphanage to shield them from interaction with schizophrenic parents, heredity can still manifest and trigger the disease.
  • This diagnosis was made in the child’s grandmother or grandfather.
  • The child’s siblings suffer from mental disorders.
  • Unfavorable external factors: birth trauma, psychological trauma in early childhood, severe infectious diseases, smoking, and alcoholism.

Anxiety in Schizophrenia

Interestingly, statistics show that the number of mentally abnormal people in Russia remains constant. On the one hand, this suggests that madness is not an epidemic and its frequency is not affected by the country’s environmental situation.

However, it should be borne in mind that almost half of the population suffers from depression and suicidal tendencies. If these disorders are classified as mental, to which schizophrenia also belongs, the situation becomes critical.

Moreover, psychotic disorders are accompanied by anxiety. Anxiety is caused by neurotic pathologies. The patient is constantly concerned about something: their appearance, work, communication with others.

Of course, it’s normal for a healthy person to experience and worry sometimes about minor reasons. But there is a difference between the anxiety of a normal person and the anxiety of a schizophrenic: for a healthy person, anxiety is caused by an objective external reason, while for a mentally ill person, it is a permanent state of the personality.

Psychosomatic Causes of Schizophrenia, Spiritual Metaphysical Reasons for the Disease

The psychosomatic causes of developing schizophrenia lie in difficult births. Moreover, the disease is related to the mind. Therefore, it can arise as a result of psychotraumatic events: a child witnessing scenes of violence. Conflictual relationships between parents before the birth of the child, abuse by the father, can provoke madness in the unborn child.

Psychosomatic causes of schizophrenia in adults:

  1. Dizziness;
  2. Vegetovascular dystonia;
  3. Weakness, malaise;
  4. Elevated body temperature;
  5. Increased blood pressure;
  6. Stomach ulcer.

V.V. Sinel’nikov identifies the causes of neurotic diseases in adults through the psychosomatic state of organs. Therefore, for the treatment of mental disorders, the author suggests collecting a detailed medical history, considering the peculiarities of the patient’s interpersonal relationships in the family and at work.

V.V. Sinel’nikov writes that psycho-emotional disorders arise when a person is in a difficult life situation for which they were not prepared. If they possess a large reserve of social behavior stereotypes, they cope with this situation, and psychopathology does not arise. However, if personal resources are limited, and the person’s level of stress resistance is low, the risk of developing a disorder is high.

Psychological Roots

In the development of pathology, the psychological factor plays a key role. It can develop against the backdrop of mental disorders. A psychotraumatic event in early childhood often becomes the cause of mental disorder in adult life. Individual episodes and life events shape personality and character.

In adults, the causes of the disease are explained by the close interconnection of body and soul. Sensations in the body are determined by a person’s emotional mood and their thoughts. However, people are not accustomed to responding to signals given by the body. As a result of prolonged psycho-emotional discomfort, painful sensations in the body intensify, leading to illness.

Risk Factors in Children

Cases of the disease in children are rare. For children, the risk factors for schizophrenia are:

  • Conflictual relationships in the family between parents. If a child witnesses constant quarrels between parents, it traumatizes their psyche, increasing the risk of developing a mental disorder;
  • Living in a large metropolis. Life in big cities is associated with a state of chronic stress, which eventually turns into madness;
  • Sexual violence. Violent actions against a child cause irreparable harm to the psyche;
  • Personal tragedy of the child. In cases of loss of parents, death of brothers or sisters, children are more susceptible to the development of schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia Psychosomatics – Opinion of Treatment Specialists

The complexity of treating this disorder lies in the patient’s refusal of medical help. Relatives of the patient, interested in his recovery, should work in tandem with the doctor.

There is a widespread view that it is impossible to get rid of the disease. Schizophrenia is a psychosomatic illness. However, L. Hay disagrees with this. She believes that madness can be cured if the right healing techniques are chosen and applied during the sensitive period of the disease. According to L. Hay, the course of the disease has periods when recovery can be achieved not through medication, but through psychological impact. L. Hay’s treatment method involves changing the patient’s social stereotypes. The effectiveness of the technique is explained by the fact that changing a person’s thoughts expands their life experience, allows them to focus on the main thing, abstracting from the secondary. Changing stereotypical thinking to positive leads to recovery.

L. Bourbo equates schizophrenia with psychosis, as the key moment in the course of these disorders is depersonalization, loss of contact with one’s inner self. L. Bourbo explains the onset of pathology with problems in child-parent relationships. A person experiencing a lack of parental attention decides to become someone else, wishing to gain the favor of the parents.

L. Bourbo believes that only the person themselves can restore contact between consciousness and the inner self. To do this, one must stop living in the past and mentally reliving unpleasant situations from childhood. For recovery, the patient needs to forgive their parents.

In treating madness, it is important to trust the recommendations of a psychiatrist and clinical psychologist. Therapy for this disease is aimed at stabilizing neurochemical disorders through the use of antipsychotic drugs.

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