Family Factors Of Schizophrenia Essay

Schizophrenia is a severe, often chronic brain disease that results in a disruption in major brain function. It occurs in roughly one out of every hundred individuals. The illness often causes a person to be unable to function at school or work. It can often be hard for those living with schizophrenia to maintain personal relationships, and even take care of their own personal needs. Reality becomes vague as the individual often has symptoms of hallucinations, delusions, disorganized speech, and disorganized behavior. Therefore, those suffering from schizophrenia have a difficult time telling the difference between what is real and what is not real. Furthermore, it very important to understand what aids in the recovery process of those that

Typically, a patient that returns to a family that has high criticism and hostility are more likely to relapse compared to families who have low levels of negative attitudes (Lopez et al, 2004). These attitudes make up a concept called expressed emotion, which is a measure of the family environment based on how relatives talk about the patient (Brewin, 1991). Studies have found that social factors are related to schizophrenia and has used these findings to develop family interventions in order to reduce the risk of relapse and severity of symptoms and increase of medication usage (Weisman de Mamani et al,

Research that has studied expressed emotion has often failed to include prosocial family functioning. They have focused on the negative aspects of family emotions, such as what the family does “wrong” to cause disruptive symptoms. However, with focus on the beneficial actions that families take, clinicians can integrate this within the family interventions. Initially, family warmth and positive remarks were included in studies on expressed emotion. However, they have received minimal attention since 1972. It is consider a complex variable and it tends to have a strong positive correlation with emotional over-involvement and a negative correlation with criticism. Therefore, studies have decided against using this variable and keep expressed emotion within a negative connotation (Lopez et al,