The Biological And Psychological Explanations Of...

In this essay I will try to explain schizophrenia and talk about the main biological and psychological explanations, also showing how similar and different they are. Schizophrenia is defined in the oxford dictionary as a long-term mental disorder of a type involving a breakdown in the relation between thought, emotion, and behaviour, leading to faulty perception, inappropriate actions and feelings, withdrawal from reality and personal relationships into fantasy and delusion, and a sense of mental fragmentation. 1 schizophrenia has positive and negative symptoms, the positive being delusions, hallucinations and disordered thoughts whereas negative symptoms consist of expressionless faces, poverty of speech and lack of motivation.2 The†¦show more content†¦Adoption Studies shows research looking at adopted children whose biological mothers were diagnosed with schizophrenia but were raised by their adoptive parents that haven t got the disorder. Dopamine is a chemical in the brain that influences the brain in a good or bad way, it has to do with regulating attention, cognition, movement and pleasure. The dopamine hypothesis states that the brain of a schizophrenic patient produces more dopamine activity than a normal brain, antipsychotic drugs play a part in explaining the dopamine hypothesis. The main Psychological explanation I will talk about it’s the cognitive. The Cognitive approach refers to faulty thinking processes and negative symptoms develop due to trying to make sense of an experience with his or hers faulty thought process. Going more into genetics, family studies have shown that the disease can be inherited by family relatives depending on how closely related they are, this is shown by concordance rates in the book page 70 table 4.1. Kendler et al (1985)3 found that first degree relatives are eighteen times more at risk to develop schizophrenia than distant relatives. Twin studies have shown that DZ twins have a concordance rate of 12 % and MZ twins with 44 % to develop schizophrenia (mcguffin farmer,1987). Gottesman and shields(1982) found using the maudsley twin register that 58% of MZ twins that were separated inherited the disorder. These rates show that