Believe it or not, schizophrenia is a serious mental problem that has been around for much longer than most people tend to think. Most professionals are certain that schizophrenia is a disease process that takes place within the brain and that the disease is, in fact, influenced greatly by certain life experiences(Anderson 80). The one significant problem surrounding schizophrenia is that no one is absolutely positive as to what causes schizophrenia and of how it actually exists in the brain. Most of what people actually know about schizophrenia today comes from medicine books and research from Europe during the 19th century. Behaviors that actually resemble the known symptoms of schizophrenia date as far back as the early 12th century B.C.(Anderson 80). Today schizophrenia affects approximately 2.2 million people in the U.S., which is about 1% of the nation’s population(Schizophreia.com). As a matter of fact, about 34% of the admissions to mental hospitals are patients that have been diagnosed with the disease of schizophrenia. Still, there are some who state that these estimates are somewhat incorrect due to misdiagnoses and mistakes. Diagnoses is a process that requires the patient showing regular signs of the schizophrenic symptoms which have lasted for at least six months(Gallaghel 61). It has been found that schizophrenia usually begins early in the patient’s life, such as adolescence. The patient’s age during hospitalization is primarily twenty to forty years(Galleghel 62). It has also been found that schizophrenia affects more men between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five and more women within the age range of twenty-five to thirty. Schizophrenics have a relatively poor chance of recovery and some patients tend to remain institutionalized for long periods in state hospitals(Schizophrenia.com). Fortunately, there is much more hope for diagnosed schizophrenics today due to advances in medicine an...
