The Pros And Cons Of Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is one of the most recognizable mental illnesses that the world knows, this comes with benefits as it does with consequences. The benefit being that many people have heard of the term, but a minute group truly know about it. This has led to a society where it is commonplace to ostracize those with the illness, which subsequently leads to negative effects on those diagnosed. It is as if society still has not developed a sufficient system in which Schizophrenia fits in. People with heart disease, cancer, and Alzheimer’s, all receive sympathy and yet people will Schizophrenia seldom receive the same. This societal separation and fear has progressively led to the development of the current stigma surrounding the illness. The general

The stigma’s greatest advocate is the general public’s ignorance on the subject of Schizophrenia. That coupled with the media’s portrayal of Schizophrenia leads to an unfounded stigma that society perpetuates (Ellison et al 341). One of the universal facts about mankind is that they have a fear of the unknown. In relation to Schizophrenia, the unknown is the illness itself and following that scenario, the lack of knowledge leads to a fear of the illness. Due to the lack of knowledge about the true nature of the illness, the general public is more inclined to allow other information to fill in the void. That is where Vahabzadeh and the media comes in; they fill in the void with their negative reports of the illness. This leaves the general public with the stereotype that people with Schizophrenia are “…dangerous, incompetent, and unpredictable…” (Weisjahn et al 231). This creates a situation where the diagnosed are exposed to the negative stigma and fall victim to a case of self-fulfilling

In recent years, the general trend has progressed towards the biogenetic endorsement of Schizophrenia. The biogenetic model focuses on combining two previous models, genetic and biological, into one coherent framework (Angermeyer et al 152). By doing this, the hope that the negatives of one model would be balanced out with the positives of the other model. For example, a consequence of endorsing the genetic model was a phenomena called genetic essentialism. In a case study by Nicolas Rusch, he defines genetic essentialism as a mindset that “…implies that genes are the unchangeable basis of a person’s identity…” which subsequently increased the prejudice against the diagnosed (Rusch pg 328). This mindset reduced the amount of blame that the public placed on the diagnosed for their condition; however, at the same it increased their fear of them. By combining the genetic model with the biological, this problem was hopefully thought to slowly dwindle down. This is so because the biological model places emphasis on what is occurring in the brain of someone who is diagnosed (Rusch pg 331). This reduced the fearfulness of the condition as the public was able to understand what was happening and why. The combination of these two models created an effective holistic model that did help reduce the stigma. However, recent studies