How Is Schizophrenia Diagnosed?

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is John Bosworth. I'm a Licensed Mental Health Counselor in St. Pete, Florida. I would like to talk a little bit about how schizophrenia is diagnosed. Schizophrenia is a major major mental illness and most people when we think of schizophrenics we think of crazy people or people that act very bizarrely and they do but a lot of a lot of research basically points to the fact that truly diagnosing somebody with schizophrenia starts usually in adolescence or early adulthood, usually that is when we see the first onset of symptoms as far as any major hallucinations or delusions and that is usually when people that I have worked with in the clinical literature suggest that they really noticed a difference in their behavior or they started noticing that there was something not quite right or actually very long with how they thought or how their thought process was. But in diagnosing somebody with schizophrenia we want to not only look at somebody with self report but we want to look at medical exams. We want to rule out any type of organic disorder or any other kind of brain disorder or dementia and we also want to look at substance abuse, some people coming off of alcohol and have not had it in their system for 48, 24, 48 hours, may also go into what is called a psychotic break or a psychotic split and that could mimic some of the symptoms of schizophrenia so when we are diagnosing somebody we want not only medical history but we want family history. We want a medical history of the family. We want to look and ask if there is anybody else in the family that has been diagnosed with any kind of schizophrenia or psychotic disorder and we also want to rule out other types of severe mental illness which could include Major Depression or Bipolar Disorder. So in getting a true diagnosis for Schizophrenia we want to look at kind of a broad range of areas including family and genetic history, medical history, substance abuse history and we also want to look at age of onset of symptoms and what type of symptoms or cluster of symptoms are characteristic of the complaints that the person has come to you for. My name is John Bosworth and we are talking about how schizophrenia is diagnosed."