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schizophrenia and antipsychotics
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Essay of 2 pages for the course Psychology at CU (1st year essay)
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Arthana Navaratnam Student ID no. 5607088Antipsychotics in successfully treating all schizophrenic symptoms.
Schizophrenia is a mental disorder which affects a person thought processes,
emotions and behaviour. A sufferer of schizophrenia has a scrambled perception of
reality. Symptoms include positive symptoms such as delusions, which are
improbable thoughts which the patient believes to be true, and hallucinations, which
are sounds or visions that seem realistic but in fact do not exist. Negative symptoms
or those which the patient lack compared to a person with a healthy mind, such as
lack of emotional expression and lack of interest. Antipsychotics are helpful towards
positive symptoms (Marques et al. 2014:1280).
A commonly used scale to assess the effectiveness of antipsychotic drugs is the
PANSS (Kay et al. 1987). It contains 30 items which are then categorised into
positive negative and general. Psychologists using the PANNS scale analyse and
report symptom severity. Using this scale Marques et al were the first study to find
that the response to antipsychotics was in a hierarchal form, they stated that
‘schizophrenia is underpinned by a single general effect with secondary and minor
lower-order effects on specific symptom domains’ (Marques et al. 2014:1279). This
suggests that antipsychotics are effective as they work in a hierarchal manner
whereby they effect a common factor which then has an effect on other subdivisions.
A study by Cuesta, Peralta & Zarzuela (2001) supports the effectiveness of
antipsychotics. There are two types of antipsychotics, atypical and conventional, the
main difference is that conventional affects dopamine whereas atypical affects
dopamine and also serotonin levels. They found that ‘atypical antipsychotics were
associated with slight differential improvements over time in attentional, verbal
memory and executive functions compared with conventional drugs’ (Cuesta, Peralta
& Zarzuela, 2001). This research adds to the many existing research conducted
which emphasise the effectiveness of antipsychotics on having positive effects on
some symptoms, especially positive, and also improving other aspects of patients
cognitive functions. Suggesting, therefore, that antipsychotics are effective.
However antipsychotics don’t have much effect on the negative symptoms. Staring,
Huurne & Gaag (2013) piloted a study on the effect of cognitive behavioural therapy
on negative symptoms. They found that CBT may be effective in reducing the
negative symptoms, patients also reported fewer dysfunctional beliefs about
cognitive abilities, performance, emotional experience and social exclusion (Staring,
Huurne & Gaag, 2013) and it was suggested that this reduction of beliefs initiated the
change in negative symptoms. This proposes that cognitive behavioural therapy can
effectively treat negative symptoms. However this was a pilot study therefore it was
small-scale, larger and controlled trials are needed to fully consider such topic.
In conclusion antipsychotics are not effective to treat schizophrenia completely as
they only target positive symptoms, leaving patients lacking emotions and interest
which can make life for their family and friends difficult. Therefore the addition of
other therapies such as cognitive behavioural therapy are needed to treat the onset
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