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Our Hive Introduction

This is the first post in this series, Our hope is to teach and to have mental health information readily available.

We have been making this information available for 3 months now.

Our hope

We wish to someday work with a psychiatric institution and conduct research ourselves funded by the payout and support of those who want to help with this movement.

In the last post, we saw how:
Bipolar Affective Disorder is a relatively common complex mood disorder that affects social and work behaviour, the features of this condition are important to make a diagnosis and start treatment.

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Depression vector created by pch.vector - www.freepik.com and Inkscape.org

Welcome to Medic Vibes, where we discuss mental health disorders and make sense of them. Dr Ebingo Kigigha is a medical doctor (aspiring psychiatrist) and creative person (illustration and music). This has been our routine for two consecutive months. This month will be dedicated to Schizophrenia. In the first month, we discussed Depression, and in the subsequent month, anxiety. We are done looking at Twitter Posts and Tik Tok and now we are moving to Quora posts.

In this post, we are looking at this study that talks about Beliefs About the Cause of Schizophrenia Among Caregivers in Midwestern Nigeria. To learn more just keep scrolling down. You can also skip to the key point of the post if you which or go to the conclusion to get the summary.

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Introduction to Schizophrenia
Although Schizophrenia is seen as a single entity, it is actually studied and comes as different conditions with different causes. Even the treatment and response to treatment are very different.

The clinical features of the condition are also very different in different people. The features come with a change in the way things are seen, changes in emotions, changes in thought processes and changes in the person's response to the environment.

Different patients respond differently to the treatment and the way the disorder expresses itself will change with time. It starts before 25 years of age and can be present for the rest of your life. There is no social class most affected. People who go through this face a lot of criticism in addition, to the families of the patient as well. This is mostly because of the lack of awareness of this condition.

Schizophrenia is very common and yet very misunderstood, some schools of thought see it as a group of conditions or as a spectrum.

The diagnosis of schizophrenia is made after taking a detailed medical history and physical examination. There are no tests for schizophrenia.

History of schizophrenia
In history, much literature has described what we now know as schizophrenia. The physician of old painted the picture of grandiose delusions, paranoid outlooks and a decline in thought processes and personality. In the 19th century, there was a consensus about the condition and it was studied. Those who championed this study were Emil Kraepelin (1856-1926) and Eugene Bleuler (1857-1939).

Benedict Morel who lived in earlier times to these two psychiatrists coin the term démence
précoce explaining that the cognitive decline started at the age of adolescence.

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Abstract

Schizophrenia is a very terrible psychiatric condition that affects the individual over a long period and comes back even after treatment. It is commoner for those in Western countries to attribute the cause of schizophrenia to more psychosocial causes, in non-western countries like Nigeria, it is thought of as a supernatural condition. Due to this belief that the condition is more supernatural, many people do not seek medical care as a first option.

In this study, Midwestern families that were caring for a patient with schizophrenia were studied. The sample size was 200 in a neuropsychiatric hospital in Benin receiving outpatient care were studied.

The caregivers of these patients were all unpaid family members. The patients were diagnosed according to the ICD criteria of 1993 and had been diagnosed for at least 2 years.

Most of the relatives (over 70%) attributed the cause to supernatural causes and close to 30% held the belief that it was psychosocial. All those who were not educated thought of it as a supernatural caused condition. It was also evident that people believed different things about this supernatural cause.

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Treatment

The best way to treat schizophrenia is with the use of antipsychotics, the use of psychosocial means to treat schizophrenia help to get the best outcomes. The pharmacodynamics are handled with biological aspects of schizophrenia while the non-biological aspects are dealt with schizophrenia. One way of treating the condition will not see the best results for schizophrenia. When drugs are prescribed, it is important to add psychosocial treatment.

Questions

What did you learn about Schizophrenia?

Conclusion

There is a lot of ignorance about the cause of schizophrenia. More people feel that it is due to supernatural causes but which supernatural causes are these?

References

Kaplan-Sadocks-Comprehensive-Textbook-Psychiatry
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NCBI

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