Schizophrenia Crossword Puzzle for Kids

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that is usually diagnosed by a psychiatrist and affects an individual's daily life. For some people, it is a lifelong mental disorder that causes them to behave, feel, or think differently than other people.

Schizophrenia can cause psychotic symptoms like hallucinations or delusions. However, not all people with schizophrenia have these symptoms all the time. Schizophrenia can also cause problems with cognition (thinking) and mood.

Schizophrenia is a common disorder, affecting one in 200 people.While it's believed that genetics, environmental, and brain chemistry play a role in such a diagnosis, it's uncertain where schizophrenia originates from. If one child in a family shows clear signs of schizophrenia, there is a higher risk that other family members will have these same symptoms.

People with schizophrenia typically have a higher risk of self-harm compared to the general populations. This might be due to hallucinations, depression, and/or other factors.

Prevention is difficult because there is no reliable way to find out in advance who will get schizophrenia. Attempting to prevent schizophrenia in the pre-onset phase with anti-psychotic drugs is of uncertain benefit and so is not recommended (as of 2009). The British NICE guidelines recommend cognitive behavioural talk therapy for all people at risk.

Name

The word schizophrenia comes from the Greek words, schisma and phren. Literally, it means split mind.

Symptoms

No medical tests can show that a person has schizophrenia. People are diagnosed based on the symptoms they report and show.

Doctors and psychologists sometimes disagree on whether a person has schizophrenia. For example, lists of schizophrenia's symptoms include wording like "Disorganized [not organized, or oddly organized] speech present for a significant portion of time." It is difficult to agree on what exactly "disorganized speech" is and how disorganized it has to be to receive a diagnosis.

The symptoms of schizophrenia fall into three main categories: positive symptoms, negative symptoms, and cognitive symptoms.

Positive symptoms are thoughts, behaviors, or anything experienced by the senses that are not shared by others - like hearing voices that are not really there. They are called 'positive' not because they are good, but because they are added.

Feeling, hearing, seeing, smelling, or tasting things that do not exist (hallucinations).

Risk factors/causes

There are many risk factors that can increase a person's chances of developing schizophrenia.

They include trauma (damage caused by stressful events) and genetics (schizophrenia running in families). Having a schizophrenic parent may be very stressful, and there may also be genes that influence the development of schizophrenia.

It is very easy to show that trauma, such as sexual abuse (forced unwanted sexual behaviour towards somebody), increases the risk, but 40 years of searching for the right genes has not found anything that has been confirmed by independent research groups.

A combination of what has happened to a person and the person’s genes may play a role in the development of schizophrenia.

People who have family members with schizophrenia and who experienced a brief period of psychotic symptoms have a 20 to 40 percent chance of being diagnosed one year later. This may be both the result of stressful events because of the family member and possibly a genetic effect.

Diagnosis

The DSM-IV-TR or the ICD-10 criteria are used to determine whether a person has schizophrenia. These criteria use the self-reported experiences of the person and reported abnormalities (unusual occurrences) in the behavior of the person, followed by a clinical assessment. A person can be determined to have the disease only if the symptoms are severe.

There are various medical conditions, other psychiatric conditions and drug abuse related reactions that may mimic the symptoms of schizophrenia (meaning they have some or all of the same symptoms). For example, delirium can cause visual hallucinations, or an unpredictable changing levels of consciousness. Schizophrenia occurs along with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), a disorder in which a person becomes obsessed with certain ideas or actions. However, separating the obsessions of OCD from the delusions of schizophrenia can be difficult.

People with schizophrenia may also have other mental health disorders, like depression, anxiety and drug abuse.

Treatment

Treatment of schizophrenia may include medication to help treat the symptoms, different types of psychotherapy (therapy by a professional), such as cognitive-behavioral therapy and many rehabilitation therapies (therapies restoring things to how they were before), such as cognitive remediation therapy. Cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT, is a talk therapy that focuses on helping the person to think about their strange ideas (delusions) in more realistic ways.

The therapist may design a behavioral experiment for paranoia (false beliefs of danger) that will help the person to find out for example, if there really are cameras everywhere in the house. For hallucinations, cognitive therapy focuses on normalizing: many people hear voices without being stressed, and we all hear voices in the form of thoughts, it is just that people with schizophrenia hear them a bit more clearly than most people.

A 2006 survey of 941 patients from 7 studies found no clear evidence that treating schizophrenia with anti-psychotic drugs early is effective. There is some evidence which shows that early treatment with drugs improves short term outcomes for people who have a serious episode of mental illness. These measures show little benefit five years later.

Some of the goals during the acute phase of treatment are to prevent harm. To prevent harm, the person being treated will have the severity of psychosis and it's symptoms reduced. These symptoms include agitation, aggression, negative symptoms, self-disorder, and thought disorders.

The first-line psychiatric treatment for schizophrenia is antipsychotic medication, which can reduce the positive symptoms in about seven to fourteen days. However, medication fails to improve negative symptoms or problems in thinking significantly.

Outlook

Schizophrenia has great human and economic costs. The condition results in a decreased life expectancy of 12 to 15 years, primarily because of its association with being overweight, not exercising, and smoking cigarettes. An increased rate of suicide (a person killing themself) plays a lesser role. These differences in life expectancy increased between the 1970s and 1990s.

Schizophrenia is a major cause of disability, with active psychosis ranked as the third-most-disabling condition. Approximately three-fourths of people with schizophrenia have an ongoing disability with symptoms that keep coming back. Some people do recover completely and others function well in society. Most people with schizophrenia live independently, with community support. In people with a first episode of serious mental symptoms, 42 percent have a good long-term outcome, 35 percent have an intermediate outcome and 27 percent have a poor outcome. Outcomes for schizophrenia appear better in the developing world than in the developed world, although that conclusion has been questioned.

The suicide rate of people who have schizophrenia is estimated to be about 4.9 percent, most often occurring in the period following the first appearance of symptoms or the first hospital admission. 20 to 40 percent try to kill themselves at least once.

Schizophrenia and smoking have shown a strong association in studies worldwide. Use of cigarettes is especially high in individuals who have schizophrenia, with estimates ranging from 80 to 90 percent of these people being regular smokers, compared to 20 percent of the general population. Those individuals who smoke tend to smoke heavily and to smoke cigarettes with a high nicotine content.

Research continues on schizophrenia. In the spring of 2013, genetics associations were shown between five major psychiatric disorders: autism, ADHD, bipolar disorder, depression, and schizophrenia per recent study. In the summer of 2013, for the first time, brain tissue development was replicated in three dimensions by scientists cloning a human "mini-brain" using stem cells. This could help with schizophrenia and autism neurological research (research related to the brain.)

Likelihood

As of 2011, schizophrenia affects around 0.3% to 0.7% of people, or 24 million people worldwide, at some point in their lives. More men are affected than women: the number of males with the disorder is 1.4 times greater than that of females. Schizophrenia usually appears earlier in men. For males the symptoms usually start from 20 to 28 years of age, and in females it is 26 to 32 years of age. Symptoms that start in childhood, middle or old age are much rarer. Despite the received wisdom that schizophrenia occurs at similar rates worldwide, its rate of likelihood varies across the world, within countries, and at the local level. The disorder causes approximately 1% of worldwide disability adjusted life years (in other words, years spent with a disability). The rate of schizophrenia varies depending on how it is defined.

Text adapted from the Simple English Wikipedia article “Schizophrenia” (revision 10830953, 2026-04-23), authors, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.