rible news, or become upset in situations that should make them happy. They may also undergo inappropriate shifts in mood. Negative symptoms include poverty in speech; flat affect and blunted affect, loss of volition, and social withdraw. Flat affect and blunted affect is when they manifest less anger, sadness, joy than most people, or they will show no emotion at all. People with schizophrenia often display alogia, a decrease in speech or speech content. Some people with this negative kind of formal thought disorder think and say very little. Other persons with alogia may say quite a bit nut still mange to convey little meaning. Loss of volition is to struggle to succeed is a distorted world. They may experience avolition, or feeling drained of energy and interest in normal goals and unable to complete a task. They just may be unable to regulate a normal, healthily life. Some people may also experience ambivalence, or conflicted feelings about most things. Social withdraw is when people is when people withdraw emotionally and socially from their environment and become totally preoccupied with their own ideas and fantasies. The may distance themselves from other people and avoid talking to them. Page 3 The next category is Psychomotor Symptoms. These symptoms include loss of movement and development of odd grimaces, gestures, and mannerisms. There is no known cause for schizophrenia. Many diseases such as: heart disease, result from an interplay of genetic, behavioral, and biological factors; and this may be the case for schizophrenia as well. Scientists do not yet understand all of the factors necessary to produce schizophrenia, but all the tools of modern biomedical research are being used to search for genes, critical moments in brain development, and other factors that may lead to the illness. It has been known by scientists and doctors that schizophrenia runs in families. The genetic view has been supported by studies of 1) relativ...
