[SOLVED] Discussion and Replies

I’m working on a Psychology question and need guidance to help me study.

The purpose of this assignment is for you to discuss the behaviors of a person who has been diagnosed with schizophrenia (real or fictional). What must his/her life be like?

This assignment is worth a total of 10 points. If you do not post your own response to this assignment any day before 11:59 p.m. on Sunday, 10/27, SIX points will be deducted from your total. In addition, if you do not meaningfully reply to at least two other students any day before 11:59 p.m. on Sunday, 10/27, TWO points will be deducted from your total for each missing reply. After you have completed all the components of this assignment, I will grade the assignment and post your score (along with some comments) in the course’s online gradebook. I will not accept late posts!

1) Read the section in your textbook on the positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia.

2) Find a video clip online (YouTube or elsewhere) showing a person with schizophrenia. It may be a clip about a real person who has schizophrenia or it may be a clip from a fictional movie or TV show. After you’ve become familiar with the video clip you’ve found, post your answer to the following questions to the Schizophrenia Discussion Board forum:

A) What kinds of positive and/or negative symptoms of schizophrenia is the person in the video you found demonstrating (refer back to the pages in your textbook on these symptoms)? Describe at least two specific examples of the person’s behavior. Both examples may be positive symptoms, or both examples may be negative symptoms, or you may also describe one example of behavior illustrating each type of symptom. Make sure to include a link to the video clip you found in your post. (6 points)

4) Read and meaningfully reply to at least two other students’ posts. (4 points)

Replies:

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7Jl9_59tfY (Links to an external site.) The video clip I found was of a woman named Michelle Hammer. She suffers from Schizophrenia. She had been incorrectly diagnosed with Bipolar disorder at 18 years old until she found a psychiatrist at 22 that listened to her explain every symptom she had and finally diagnosed her with Schizophrenia. Michelle has since then become a mental health advocate and has created her own business called Schizophrenic.NYC. She created it to raise awareness about the disorder and give back to the mentally ill community.

In this video clip, Michelle suffers from positive symptoms such as delusions of persecution and auditory hallucinations. She explains in the video that her mother and college roommate were trying to hurt or kill her and that everyone was out to get her which is a symptom of her delusion of persecution. She would have episodes of auditory hallucinations which presented itself as hearing voices coming from the right side of her head. Those voices would come as negative statements like “everyone hates you” and the left side of her head has voices that offer positive words and is known to her as the “good side”. When she takes her medicine, the “good side” of her mind wins.

2.

Schizophrenic Episode (Links to an external site.)I found this woman originally on Facebook which led me to her YouTube channel. She posts a bunch of different videos about her schizophrenia, ranging from her episodes and poetry to informational videos as well. Her videos are very insightful on what this mental illness is truly like in day to day life.

I chose this specific video because it was one of the longer ones. Most of her recordings are just short clips of specific times when she is having hallucinations or hearing voices. In this particular video though, she has an episode that results in many positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia

I chose to talk about two positive symptoms that she was displaying. First off, the book defines positive symptoms as “pathological excesses or bizarre additions to a person’s behaviors. Delusions, disorganized thinking and speech heightened perceptions and hallucinations and inappropriate affect are ones of the most common found” (Comer 427). The first positive symptom she was experiencing was delusions of grandeur. Basically, this means that the person believes themselves to be great inventors, religious saviors, or other specially empowered persons (Comer 429). She thinks she is a God because she is the only person that dead people can see and communicate with. She stated, “So it seems like I’m kind of a special God or something in Deadville because I’m a living human they can see” She also talks about how cool she is and how all the dead people really like her. Another positive symptom that she experienced during this episode was loose associations or derailment. The book defines this as, “the most common formal thought disorder, one rapidly shifts from one topic to another, believing that their incoherent statements make sense. A single, perhaps unimportant word in one sentence becomes the focus of the next” (Comer 429). She keeps rambling on and skipping from one topic to the next. She goes from frequency to personality to stereotyping and generalizations. She then continues onto god, angels, and dead people yet again, then onto judging and being judged to get into heaven. She finishes off by saying that there is so much going on in her head that one could not understand her thoughts.