Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

 Schizophrenia  refers to a class of disorders in which severe distortion of reality 
occurs. Thinking, perception, and emotion may deteriorate; the individual may with-
draw from social interaction; and the person may display bizarre behavior. Although 
there are several types of schizophrenia (see Figure 7 ), the distinctions between them 
are not always clear. Moreover, the symptoms displayed by persons with schizophre-
nia may vary considerably over time, and people with schizophrenia show signifi cant 
differences in the pattern of their symptoms even when they are labeled with the 
same diagnostic category. Nonetheless, a number of characteristics reliably distin-
guish schizophrenia from other disorders. They include the following: 
• Decline from a previous level of functioning . An individual can no longer carry 
out activities he or she was once able to do.
• Disturbances of thought and speech . People with schizophrenia use logic and 
language in a peculiar way. Their thinking often does not make sense, and 
schizophrenia 
A class of disorders in 
which severe distortion of reality occurs.
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Module 47 
The Major Psychological Disorders 
525
their logic is frequently faulty, which is referred to as a formal thought disorder . 
They also do not follow conventional linguistic rules (Penn et al., 1997). 
Consider, for example, the following response to the question “Why do you 
think people believe in God?” 
Uh, let’s, I don’t know why, let’s see, balloon travel. He holds it up for you, the 
balloon. He don’t let you fall out, your little legs sticking down through the clouds. 
He’s down to the smokestack, looking through the smoke trying to get the balloon 
gassed up you know. Way they’re fl ying on top that way, legs sticking out. I don’t 
know, looking down on the ground, heck, that’d make you so dizzy you just stay and 
sleep you know, hold down and sleep there. I used to be sleep outdoors, you know, 
sleep outdoors instead of going home. (Chapman & Chapman, 1973, p. 3) 
As this selection illustrates, although the basic grammatical structure may be 
intact, the substance of thinking characteristic of schizophrenia is often illogi-
cal, garbled, and lacking in meaningful content (Holden, 2003; Heinrichs, 
2005).
• Delusions . People with schizophrenia often have delusions, fi rmly held, 
unshakable beliefs with no basis in reality. Among the common delusions 
people with schizophrenia experience are the beliefs that they are being 
controlled by someone else, they are being persecuted by others, and their 
thoughts are being broadcast so that others know what they are thinking 
(Coltheart, Langdon, & McKay, 2007; Startup, Bucci, & Langdon, 2009).
• Hallucinations and perceptual disorders . People with schizophrenia do not 
perceive the world as most other people do. They also may have hallucinations,
the experience of perceiving things that do not actually exist. Furthermore, 
they may see, hear, or smell things differently from others (see Figure 8 ); they 
do not even have a sense of their bodies in the way that others do and have 
diffi culty determining where their bodies stop and the rest of the world begins 
(Copolov et al., 2003; Botvinick, 2004; Thomas et al., 2007).