- Characteristic symptoms in childhood
- Types of schizophrenia
- How the diagnosis is made
- What is the treatment
Schizophrenia is a mental illness characterized by distortion of thinking and perception, which usually translates into delusional ideas, hallucinations, discourses and altered behavior. Since hallucinations and delusions in children are usually less elaborate than in adults, like seeing people, one should try to understand whether they are really hallucinations or just games.
This disease usually appears between 10 and 45 years old, being very rare in childhood. Although there are some reports of the disease under the age of 5 years, these cases are very rare, and the symptoms become more evident during adolescence.
Schizophrenia usually begins at a pre-psychotic stage, in which negative symptoms of the disease arise, such as social isolation, disruptive behaviors, deterioration in personal hygiene, outbursts of anger or loss of interest in school or work, for example. When the disease appears before the age of 12, it is strongly associated with behavioral problems and the prognosis is worse. This is because they are more likely to lose normal functions and develop emotional disorders, intellectual and language changes.
Characteristic symptoms in childhood
When schizophrenia occurs before the age of 12, the child begins to show behavioral problems. Generally, it shows resistance to adapt to society, isolates itself, assumes strange behaviors and, in some cases, a delay in neuropsychomotor development is also manifested. In addition to the cognitive deficit, there is also a deficit in attention and in learning and abstraction.
As the child grows up and enters adulthood, other characteristic symptoms of the disease may appear, which are subdivided into positive and negative. Positive symptoms are those that are most visible in the acute decompensation stages of the disease and negative symptoms are those that result from the evolution of schizophrenia itself, from the effects of antipsychotic medication and secondary to the positive symptoms themselves.
Find out what symptoms of schizophrenia can appear as your child moves into adulthood.
Types of schizophrenia
In the classic model, schizophrenia can be divided into 5 types:
- Paranoid schizophrenia, where positive symptoms predominate; Disorganized, in which changes in thinking are prevalent; Catatonic, characterized by the predominance of motor symptoms and changes in activity; Undifferentiated, where intellectual and work performance is reduced and social isolation predominates; Residual, where negative symptoms predominate, in which, as in the previous one, there is marked social isolation, as well as affective dullness and intellectual poverty.
However, the schizophrenia defined in DSM V no longer includes five types of schizophrenia, as the subtypes are considered to be associated. Thus, the subtypes mentioned above are not watertight, and the person may, at a certain point in the evolution of the disease, present a clinical picture that identifies with another type of schizophrenia or manifest symptoms of another subtype.
Learn, in more detail, how to identify the various types of schizophrenia.
How the diagnosis is made
The diagnosis of schizophrenia is not a simple diagnosis to make, and in children it can become even more difficult to differentiate from other conditions, especially bipolar affective disorder, and it is necessary to re-evaluate the symptoms over time.
What is the treatment
Schizophrenia has no cure and treatment is usually carried out with the aim of reducing symptoms, as well as relapses. Antipsychotics are generally prescribed, however, there are few studies of these drugs in childhood.
Haloperidol is a medicine that has been used for several years, and remains a good choice for the treatment of psychosis in children. In addition, risperidone and olanzapine have also been used in the treatment of childhood psychoses, with good results.
