A Misunderstood and Isolating Condition
Can schizophrenia be cured? What is it? What are signs and symptoms? It’s often difficult for friends and loved ones to comprehend. And others’ difficulty in understanding it can impact a person’s wellbeing, worsening their mental health. As we know, a lack of understanding often manifests in humans as fear or prejudice. And that fear may cause friends and family to keep a distance instead of offering support.
Meanwhile, isolation is a leading driver of episode onset and severity in schizophrenia. People with this diagnosis need community perhaps as much as they need medication or therapy, and family involvement in their care significantly improves outcomes. To that end, we’ve gathered some of the most commonly asked questions about schizophrenia and provided in-depth answers, with the goal of improving your understanding of this little-understood condition.
How do you communicate with someone experiencing psychosis?
What is schizophrenia?
For starters, a definition: Schizophrenia is a brain disorder that disrupts how a person thinks, perceives, and relates to reality. There are a number of positive and negative symptoms that may or may not all be present for a person with schizophrenia:
Positive Symptoms
This may sound like it means good symptoms, but “positive symptoms” refers to traits that are added to a person’s personality due to a condition, or wouldn’t be present without the condition.
- Hallucinations: hearing voices or seeing things that no one else does, or less commonly, feeling unexplained physical sensations like touch, pressure, or temperature.
- Delusion: believing things that are not in alignment with known reality, for example, thoughts of persecution or that they have special powers.
- Time perception: how much time has passed or the chronology of events can become distorted.
- Disorganized states: thought, speech, and behavior become disorganized, unpredictable, or hard for others to understand.
Negative Symptoms
Negative symptoms are those that represent an absence of personality traits due to a condition.
- Subdued affect: dulling of emotional experience and expression, perhaps speaking with a dull or monotone voice.
- Fatigue: reduced motivation, social withdrawal.
- Cognitive impairment: reduced working memory and attention, difficulty planning and executing, and slower mental processing.
Can someone with schizophrenia lead a normal life?
Many people living with schizophrenia lead fulfilling, meaningful, and typical lives. Modern antipsychotic medications eliminate or significantly reduce most patients’ hallucinations and delusions. For the majority of people with schizophrenia, it’s similar to type 1 diabetes or epilepsy in terms of its impact on life—it’s something to be mindful of and manage.
A minority of patients experience ongoing, or attenuated, symptoms that impact day-to-day life. But even in this case, having ongoing delusions, for example, is not a black-or-white proposition. Many people with baseline delusion or hallucination—that which occurs during remission—are able to apply meta-cognition and stay connected with shared reality. Overall, 80 to 88% of cases respond to medication.
How do you diagnose schizophrenia?
A clinical diagnosis is usually made by a doctoral-level clinician, or in some cases a masters-level mental health counselor. There is no lab test, so clinicians base diagnosis on the presence of both positive and negative symptom clusters. Research suggests that direct observation is important, and diagnosis accuracy without it is poor.
Beyond the presence of symptoms, experienced clinicians also know to look for conditions or circumstances that can lead to false positive diagnoses: Substance use, certain medical conditions, and even autism can be mistaken for schizophrenia.
Can schizophrenia be cured?
No. Mental health conditions are treated rather than cured. Long-term management of unwanted traits or symptoms includes medication, family involvement, and outpatient therapy. With these supports, the majority of patients live fulfilling and meaningful lives. The sooner treatment begins after onset, the better the outcome.
What are some treatments for schizophrenia?
Medication
A host of antipsychotic medications work to prevent or reduce hallucinations and delusions in most patients.
Inpatient Hospitalization
Hospitalization is rare for most people who are engaged with other effective treatments, but it may be occasionally necessary to help a patient come through psychosis safely.
Residential Treatment
The right residential mental health program can empower a person with schizophrenia to live more fully and independently, through integrated care and support that may include:
- Individual and group therapy.
- Life skills development.
- Medication management.
- Movement therapy (yoga, fitness, etc.).
- Art and other recreational therapies.
- Life skills development.
- Family psychoeducation.
- Planning for the future.
- Transitional housing.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
CBT helps patients examine the evidence for or against a belief, which can allow cognizance of delusions and hallucinations. Other benefits include support around self-image, community participation, and hope.
Family Involvement
After proper medication, family involvement is the strongest protective factor against relapse.
Coordinated Specialty Care (CSC)
CSC combines the proper medication and therapy with family and community support, dramatically improving patients’ wellbeing over medication alone. Elements of CSC include:
- Cognitive behavioral therapy.
- Individualized medication management.
- Resiliency training.
- Family education programs.
- Supported employment and education.
Everyone’s journey looks different. One person might find fulfillment living alone and working full time, while another might do better working part time with extra day-to-day support. Some individuals feel safest living with family or in a community group home.
Treatment for Schizophrenia at CooperRiis
At CooperRiis, schizophrenia is a diagnosis we treat, but it’s not the organizing principle of a person’s treatment. We only focus on diagnosis when it’s therapeutically necessary, such as in the case of medication management. Otherwise, we focus on the person: what they want from their life, what has made that difficult, and what kind of support will help them move toward the life they want.
That support includes strong clinical care, but it also extends into the parts of life that schizophrenia may have disrupted, like relationships, work, physical health, or confidence. Mental health recovery requires ownership, which is why residents at CooperRiis have a real voice in their care. We’re here to help them build the tools to reach their own goals.
Our two evidence-based programs offer longer- or shorter-term care tailored to each person’s needs and circumstances:
The Farm
Our therapeutic farm in Mill Spring is a long-term, private-pay residential program.
- Setting: Located on a peaceful 94-acre campus in the Blue Ridge Mountains foothills near Tryon.
- Duration: Varies from ~6 weeks to ~6 months.
- Capacity: Accommodates 36 male and female residents across three separate lodges.
- Amenities: Offers private bedrooms with private bathrooms, an art barn, gym, woodshop, lake, and organic gardens and greenhouses.
- Routine: Residents engage in purposeful work on campus during the week, with community trips scheduled for weekends.
CooperRiis at Asheville
Our short-term program in Asheville is more intensive and accepts both insurance and private pay.
- Setting: Located in downtown Asheville, NC.
- Duration: Short-term residential program lasting between 45 to 90 days.
- Approach: Combines intensive clinical care with skill-building using an evidence-based therapeutic group structure.
- Purpose: Designed for individuals in early recovery, those experiencing setbacks, or people dealing with recurrent mental health challenges. It establishes a foundation for longer-term recovery or transition into other programs like The Farm.
