Psychological disorders have always been a topic of interest of the general public. Movies and television series commonly portray various types of mental disorders, from eating disorders to schizophrenia. Even though these representations are important to inform the general public, sometimes what remains from the movies and TV shows is just the mystification and misconstruction of mental disorders.
One of the psychological disorders often represented in fiction is Schizophrenia. For example, in movies such as “A Beautiful Mind”, “Shutter Island”, and “Black Swan”, we can see characters that present symptoms of psychosis. Schizophrenia is characterized by positive symptoms, negative symptoms, and cognitive impairment. The positive symptoms are psychotic behaviors generally not seen in healthy people, presented as hallucinations and delusions. The negative symptoms are represented by disruptions of normal emotions and behaviors, usually presented as a “flat affect”. The neurobiology involved in the disease is still not fully understood. Scientific evidence points that there is a high expression of dopamine in the brain of schizophrenic patients. The relationship between dopamine and the onset of schizophrenia is not clear, but it is possible to treat positive symptoms with antipsychotic medications. Unfortunately, antipsychotics present a lot of side effects and they only treat positive symptoms. The negative symptoms and the cognitive impairment still cannot be treated with medication. Recent studies point that there are other chemical pathways involved in the maintenance of Schizophrenia, but it is still not clear how we could correctly target these pathways to treat the disease.
It is of great importance that the scientific community continues to investigate the biological basis of Schizophrenia and other mental disorders. It is also important to keep in mind that mental disorders are not just what we see in movies or TV shows, and the patients and their family need all the support to deal with such a difficult and complicated disease.
What is Schizophrenia?
