Schizophrenia is the most devastating psychotic mental illness found in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual (DSM). This mental illness has been around since ancient times and people through history have been suffering from schizophrenia. In the ancient times mental illnesses were not always recognized. During the middle ages people suffering from this mental disorder and many others were burned to the stake as witches and sorcerers. Schizophrenia is no laughing matter. The sufferers who are untreated suffer from delusions and hallucinations and their minds are trapped in a world that does not exist outside of their heads. However, that terrifying world of fear and absurdity is very real to them.

The symptoms of schizophrenia are classified as positive and negative. Positive symptoms are symptoms that the average person does not have, and so they are added onto a sufferer of schizophrenia. These symptoms are thought disorder, hallucinations, and delusions. The negative symptoms are symptoms, which are lacking in patients with schizophrenia, but are normal behaviors for other people. These symptoms will include, lack of affect (emotion), inappropriate affect, laughing or crying when there is no real need to do so, inability to move (catatonia), incoherent speech, flight thoughts and ideas that do not make sense or follow a logical pattern, flat voice, lack of facial expression, poor hygiene, inability to carry out a goal, or lack of decision making abilities, lack of speech and so on.

Researchers separate schizophrenia into five separate categories and the symptoms will vary among categories.

Paranoid Schizophrenia

People suffering from paranoid schizophrenia will experience both hallucinations, which are seeing things that are not there and delusions, which are beliefs and thoughts about things, which are just not true. The hallucinations can be auditory where they hear voices inside their heads, voices that nobody else can hear. A classic example of a delusion is believing the CIA is spying on their every move or has some kind of mind device to read their minds and broadcast their thoughts to the world. They people everyone is out to hurt them in some way and they cannot trust anybody. They live in fear and apprehension not knowing when someone will attack them or poison them, or hurt them in some way. These feelings of anxiety may give rise to nervous twitches and other feelings of discomfort.

Still other people suffering from paranoid schizophrenia may show symptoms of delusions of grandeur. This is where they believe they are somebody really important like Queen Elizabeth or George Washington.

Disorganized Schizophrenia

Disorganized Schizophrenia is another subtype of Schizophrenia. The main characteristic of this subtype is emotional and disorganized thoughts. Sufferers may have no facial expression, flat affect, which means they cannot express emotions. They might have psychomotor poverty, which means trouble with movement, derailment of thoughts, and reality distortion.

Catatonic Schizophrenia

People in a catatonic state will either be hyperactive rocking back and forth, pacing back and forth, and so on. Or go into the exact opposite mode and not move or speak or stare into space for hours on end. Fortunately, this type of condition is very rare now with the newer medications that are prescribed for schizophrenia.

Undifferentiated schizophrenia

In this subtype of schizophrenia the sufferer may exhibit several types of schizophrenia symptoms and cannot be singled out for any one subtype of schizophrenia. They might also appear to have a neurological disorder.

Residual schizophrenia

This category occurs in people who had schizophrenia in the past, but have not shown any symptoms in years and then it may come back again.

One in every day thousand people are said to develop some kind of schizophrenia or schizoid disorder.

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