A key environmental factor contributing to and highly predictive of psychiatric illness is stress. Children with a history of trauma or maltreatment are at enormous lifetime risk for anxiety, depression, PTSD, suicide,...
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Did you know that schizophrenia affects more than 1 percent of the world's population? See NARSAD Grants at work on the latest schizophrenia research
Schizophrenia is a severe, chronic, and generally disabling brain and behavior disorder. It is most accurately described as a psychosis - a type of illness that causes severe mental disturbances that disrupt normal thoughts, speech, and behavior. Schizophrenia is believed to be caused by a combination of genetic and environmental factors.
Positive symptoms may include delusions, thought disorders, and hallucinations. People with schizophrenia may hear voices other people don't hear, or believe other people are reading their minds, controlling their thoughts, or plotting to harm them. Negative symptoms may include avolition (a lack of desire or motivation to accomplish goals), lack of desire to form social relationships, and blunted affect and emotion. Cognitive symptoms involve problems with attention and memory, especially in planning and organization to achieve a goal. Cognitive deficits are the most disabling for patients trying to lead a normal life.
Visit the Schizophrenia Research Forum, fully sponsored by the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation—a virtual community of scientists collaborating in their quest for causes, improved treatments, and better understanding of schizophrenia.
Joan Kaufman, Ph.D.
February 01, 2011
The Garatt Family
February 01, 2011
No one knows better than the Garatt family how far research in mental illness has come – and how far it still has to go. Thirty-three years ago, when Sean Garatt was diagnosed with schizophrenia, his mother, Marcia, was...
Xiangzhong Zheng, PhD
February 01, 2011
The work of a NARSAD Young Investigator could help cast a new light on how a timing system in our body responsive to the day/night cycle generated by the rotation of the Earth is implicated in seasonal depression. Part of...
TAGS: Basic Research, Discoveries, Depression
Randy Blakely, Ph.D.
February 01, 2011
With the help of an initial NARSAD Distinguished Investigator grant, Randy Blakely, Ph.D., and a team of researchers at Vanderbilt University and the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in San Antonio have...
Dr. Jonathan Javitch
February 01, 2011
Expressed widely throughout the brain, dopamine is a message-carrying molecule called a neurotransmitter, which is involved in a number of regulatory processes related to movement and aspects of cognition such as...
TAGS: Basic Research, Discoveries, Schizophrenia
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