I am going to be discussing briefly what schizophrenia is and the symptoms it can cause especially the ones related to communication. How communication is effected from this disorder and research studies towards schizophrenia and communication. Swiss psychiatrist Paul Eugen Bleuler created the term in 1910. “Although people often mistakenly think of schizophrenia as a split personality disorder, Bleuler had actually intended the term to refer to the dissociation or ‘loosening’ of thoughts and feelings that he had found to be a prominent feature of illness” Dr Burton, N (2007). Schizophrenia is not like a split personality disorder because although they may hear voices that they recognise as specific people and may believe things that are out …show more content…
The first group is positive symptoms which include hallucinations and dilutions, Cognitive symptoms include difficulties with attention, concentration and memory and in Negative symptoms there are usually impaired attention, restrictions in the amount and range of speech, restrictions of the range of emotions or inappropriate emotions, they usually lack drive and motivation and are socially withdrawn. Sufferers rarely recover fully from schizophrenia and it becomes a lifelong process, with many challenges and will rarely become symptom free, with three in five sufferers getting better with treatment but still having some symptoms and one in five continuing to have troublesome symptoms, we can see why communicating with people who suffer from schizophrenia is vital in helping them achieve their fullest potential. Especially because “medication is never enough, in order to get the most out of the treatment they must build a strong support system” Smith, M (2015) and that support system is based on communicating effectively with the …show more content…
She conducted three stages of clinical interviews. The first study was to explore and describe verbal and non-verbal communications between interviewer and sufferer, the second study was to study the stability of facial affective expressions in emotional interplay and the third was to study the interplay between gaze and facial effective behaviour. When the communication was well functioning it was when the interviewer asked short open questions and explored the sufferer’s content of discussion emotionally, the interviewer showed nonverbal signs of communication and this invited social interaction which led to it turning into a dialogue. This made the sufferer take a more active part and the discussion became more elaborated. In poorly functioning communication the conversations were disjointed the sufferer generally avoided eye contact and long pauses were frequent, this was usually down to being asked extended questions with abstract term for example love and fear. Her results concluded “the importance of heeding the emotional interplay when communicating with people with schizophrenia” Bergman, H (2006) this suggests what Katie Glover wrote in her book communicating with people who have a mental health disorder, to be effective