Definition
Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that is difficult to define because it can present itself in very different ways. There are typical symptoms, such as paranoia and delusions, but the emotional experience can also be strongly influenced. Schizophrenia is therefore basically a disorder of stimulus perception and processing, which leads to an impairment of the perception of reality.
As a rule, the sufferers are not aware that their lived reality does not correspond to reality. Psychosis is a special complex of symptoms that leads to a changed perception of reality and self-perception, as it can also be the case with schizophrenia. Typically these are hallucinations, delusions, ego disturbances, increased restlessness, concentration problems and the like. The cause of these changes is irrelevant, only the appearance is called psychosis. Psychosis can therefore be understood as an umbrella term for various illnesses that all cause similar symptoms.
What is the difference?
The definitions of schizophrenia and psychosis are often quite vague, as these disorders cannot be precisely defined. It is therefore particularly difficult to separate the terms from one another because they often overlap. For example, schizophrenia has psychotic components, namely in the form of the typical symptoms of distorted perception of reality such as delusions, hallucinations, intuitions, and so on.
However, to call a schizophrenia a pure psychosis is still not quite correct, since the actually serious symptoms, which are of the emotional disorder, do not occur in typical psychoses. In schizophrenia, not only the so-called plus symptoms, which are similar to those of a psychosis, occur, but also the so-called minus symptoms, which are the actual impairment of the patient. Plus symptoms are called so because they are added to normal thinking and experiencing, as is the case with hallucinations, delusions and the like.
What kind of plus symptoms occur depends on the form and severity of the schizophrenia. There is the typical paranoid delusion or hearing voices, as it is known in society under the term schizophrenia. But there are many other, less typical manifestations of schizophrenia.
Minus symptoms, on the other hand, occur in every type of schizophrenia, although with varying degrees of severity. They are referred to as such because they involve a loss of cognitive and emotional abilities that do not regress at some point like the plus symptoms. Regardless of their psychotic episodes, schizophrenia patients suffer a permanent reduction in their attention and concentration as well as a so-called flattening of the emotions, i.e. a reduction in their emotional vibratory and processing abilities.
This makes normal contact and communication with the affected persons incredibly difficult. They are indifferent to their environment and become increasingly alienated from their relatives. The result is complete social isolation and the loss of their connection to society.
At some point, the patients live in a world of their own from which it is no longer so easy to get them out. Participation in professional life is also no longer possible at this stage. Unfortunately, these negative symptoms hardly respond to medication and are therefore difficult to control. In comparison to schizophrenia, psychoses do not show these changes and can usually be controlled well with the usual antipsychotics. Schizophrenia therefore has psychotic components, but goes far beyond a pure psychosis.
