Poll: Is Schizophrenia a Disease?

I cringe when people call Sz a ‘disease’. An illness? An affliction? For sure. But I’ve never thought of myself as diseased.

Do you think Sz is a disease, and if so, why?

  • Yes

  • No

0 voters

I prefer to call it a disorder or disability before I start calling it an illness. However, sometimes “illness” fits as the brain will feel physically ill in my case.

A “disease”, perhaps, should stay limited to the empirically verifiable - as in blood tests or brain scans could detect anomalies within the physical structure of a known area of the body. Doesn’t bother me that some people think of it as a disease, though.

I hope we find out on some “other side” what in the blue hell causes or even IS this damn thing, though.

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It’s primarily psychogenic in the majority of cases - imo. Jung was right. Give things another 200 years for a proper approach/treatment.

I am diagnosed with Bipolar disorder, its uncertain if I also have some Schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia is not really a disease, but more of a Disorder or Condition.

But I guess some feel comfortable calling it a disease, I prefer to call it a disorder or illness.

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In my lecture the other day, the instructor who is a psych NP, kept calling it a disease. She likened it to diabetes being a disease. SZics have problems with neurotransmitters, genetic link, and sometimes brain abnormalities. In fact I think the instructor kept calling it a “chronic” disease.

I think for us szs is a lot different, the approach to the word if you know what I mean. It’s stigmatized and we often can stigmatize ourselves with those words. I don’t like the word illness or disease also, I’m going to staart calling it disorder like the others said. It fits better.

Now that you’ve got me thinking about it, I’d like to call it an “Augmentation”.

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As a family member, I say illness only in relation to debilitating symptoms. People who are debilitated by illness need support and treatment; that is the only way I can think of to convey the need for assistance in many forms.

However, a large part of me does not think of schizophrenia as illness (and certainly not disease). There are so many aspects of all that is called schizophrenia that are unknown.

When my family member is doing alright, even though he has positive symptoms of psychosis, I would not call that illness, condition, or disorder.

Good question. I am trying to find language.

How old is she? A lot of the people that work in the mental health system at the moment that are like 40+ are still extremely ignorant & even flat-out outdated on a lot of their education about SZ.

My doctor(s) don’t look at any of the emerging studies, and my therapist can’t think outside of purely anecdotal evidences, but at least he has experience trying to recondition people with SZ. Most doctors don’t, just learned from texts dated back in the '70s or '80s about it.

New material needs to be published, especially material demonstrating the stability of unmediated persons - which is typically far more positive than previous studies claim(ed).

She’s about 60-something. She’s been a psych nurse for 30+ years.

i think it is a disorder in the brain and can be prevented

You are looking at it from the outside.

I think disorder is a euphemism. Instead of a disease, which would apply to everyone who has it, I would call it an illness, something that the person with it has to withdraw from the world, must take medication for it, has to get help, even go to the hospital. Here we are quibbling over words and the meaning of words.

they are all we have (apart from this disease)

i suppose we use different words sometimes depending on how we feel but i may be wrong

I think that even the neuroscientists are in disagreement as to what SZ is. We, individually, have them all fooled. We are big fools ourselves as well.

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Deny calling it a disease if you like. Schizophrenic brains are damaged by the illness therefore I say it is a disease.

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the biggest haha

My pdoc calls it an illness.

I’m certain there is some degree of brain injury. Healthy people don’t suddenly lose parts of their brain function.

Pixel.

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It’s disabling. Not a disease though, more of an attack, like a torture or something, like a murder or something like that.

It’s like some of dat nebuchennezar stuff you know. You can do alot of things to the brain/mind.

A brain problem, we’ll just call it that shall we, an induced brain problem that isn’t a disease.

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