Schizophrenia is a mental disorder or illness that has no perfect cure. It shows some symptoms like delusions, hallucinations, disordered or incoherency in both thinking and speech, an abnormal attitude, and unnatural mood swings.
While this problem cannot be cured completely, it can be treated successfully. Antipsychotic medicines are important for managing these symptoms.
Those medications are most crucial in successful schizophrenia treatment, but patients also need therapy, changes in lifestyle, self-management, and social support as well. Schizophrenia treatment needs to be started as soon as possible to manage the symptoms successfully.
Can schizophrenia be cured completely?
Schizophrenia is a psychotic condition with the characteristic features of a break with reality that may cause several problematic symptoms.
The most common symptoms are delusions and hallucinations, but this ailment also becomes the reason for disordered thinking, unnatural behaviors and mood changes, depression, anxiety, and other symptoms.
All of these make it much more difficult to communicate with others, to continue with a job, or to be successful in a career.
Schizophrenia is a chronic mental problem, meaning there is no perfect cure for it. However, there are some steps in schizophrenia treatment that can help the patients to reduce the symptoms and cope up with this mental disorder to a great extent.
In this case, a combination of therapy and medicines is the most powerful treatment and helps the patients to live a better life.
Schizophrenia treatment and its steps
Proper diagnosis
Schizophrenia treatment starts with the proper diagnosis of the problem. There are five types of symptoms through which diagnosis of schizophrenia can be done:
Delusions: Delusions are false beliefs that cannot be removed by logic.
Hallucinations: Hallucinations are the false impression of having the sense of voices, sounds, images, or sensations that the patient thing real, but that is not true.
Disorganized attitude or behavior: Disorganized behaviors are actually the display of agitation, aggression, or acting in an unusual way.
Unusual thoughts and speech: These are actually thoughts that jump from one topic to another very quickly, resulting in communication problems that don’t make sense to others.
Negative signs: Negative symptoms or signs of schizophrenia may include reduced emotional response, lethargy or catatonia, showing no emotions, etc.
In order to be properly diagnosed, an individual must have a minimum of two of the symptom types mentioned above, and one of those needs to be delusions, hallucinations, or disorganized speech.
Schizophrenia treatment or how to manage the symptoms
Using medication
It can be assumed that proper medication is a cure for any illness, but this isn’t always true. With schizophrenia, the medications help the patients to manage the symptoms, but they cannot completely cure the condition. Though they cannot provide a cure, they have to play a crucial role and help many schizophrenic patients to get relief.
Proper diet
Like other health problems, schizophrenia can be affected by what an individual eats. Having extra free radical damage and not getting enough antioxidants through diet is also connected to a higher chance of having schizophrenia.
Importance of therapy in schizophrenia treatment
Not only medication but patients also need various types of therapy to treat their mental illness. One-on-one therapies, like cognitive behavioral therapy, can help the patients immensely by taking active steps to fight their illness.
Therapists can guide the patients through practical actions and thus help them to recognize and correct their negative behaviors and moods as well. Thus, schizophrenia treatment can be done successfully with the help of some crucial steps, and the patients can live a healthy and normal life.
